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Article history: Received: July 17, 2018 Received in revised format: July 24, 2018 Accepted: August 12, 2018 Available online: August 12, 2018 Innovation has become unavoidable choice for companies to survive. However, a high percentage of new products fail, which increase the risk of using innovative ideas. Therefore, to control and reduce the risk of introducing new products, most companies need to invent new products that can meet the customers’ real needs. Accordingly, customer must be the main source of the information through which the ideas of new products are generated. Having the knowledge about the market needs and trends is not enough as the knowledge needs to be translated into real products. Hence, capabilities, in this context, play a vital role to enhance product innovation performance of the organizations. Thus, this study investigates the role of manufacturing capabilities in enhancing the organizations’ abilities to translate the ideas into the right product that can meet customers’ needs. Moreover, this paper discusses the link between customer knowledge management and developing manufacturing capabilities. The study is conducted in Malaysia, and uses the information of 134 manufacturing companies for the survey. Partial least square is used to obtain the results. The findings are discussed and compared with other results in the literature. © 2018 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada