CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT (original) (raw)

New Product Development (NPD) is a knowledge intensive process where the generation of new ideas and concepts requires detailed knowledge of both products and customers. Managing customer knowledge in NPD process can assist firms overcome customer acceptance issues associated with innovative products. Methodologies that advance both a firms understanding of customer choice motives and value systems, and its knowledge management process, can increase the chances of new product success. Customer knowledge has been increasingly recognized as a key strategic resource in any company’s success. Customer knowledge has been recognized within marketing as a significant resource that can be managed to support R&D, to improve innovation, to facilitate sensing of emerging market opportunities and to support the management of long-term customer relationships. Technology can facilitate gathering and analyzing customer data as well as transferring customer information within an organization, but they are not able to convert information to knowledge, because knowledge is always related to a person or a group of people. Customer information and knowledge generated has to be integrated into that organization’s everyday operations and processes at the right time to benefit both the company and customer. Knowledge management enables Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to expand from its current “mechanistic, technology-driven, data-oriented approach” towards more holistic, complex, and insightful ways of developing and using customer knowledge. Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) is described as an ongoing process of generating, disseminating and using customer knowledge within an organization and between an organization and its customer. In this paper, our purpose is to provide conceptual framework of CKM in New Product Development as an integrated management approach and competence it requires. This paper is a preparatory step of a wider research. This paper demonstrates success factors of CKM that can be used in designing the CRM that support CKM in NPD to improve the new product performance.