The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

16.1. Introduction

Innovative firms interact with customers extensively to obtain necessary input for their new product development (NPD) projects. Customer input is needed to overcome the inherent risks associated with NPD, to develop a product that fulfils customer needs better than competitors do, and to manage the overall innovation process and outcome better. Yet, customer interaction is easily overlooked amid the pressure to develop new products quickly and squeeze costs from NPD programs. In addition, customer input and interaction has been among the most controversial of approaches. It has been heralded as a necessity for a successful innovation and lambasted as a useless exercise because customer inputs are often unreliable, misleading, fuzzy, and imprecise. Product managers are partly to blame for this controversy because they do not know how to interact with the customers correctly. For instance, Cooper (1999) argues that despite a significant amount of research into why new products fail, product managers have not learned their lesson and continue to make the same mistakes that lead to product failure. One such mistake is that the customer input is still missing in most new products. Hence, the method of customer questioning and the overall approach to customer interaction are important considerations in NPD. The objective of this chapter is to outline the strategies needed to effectively interact with customers and obtain necessary input from them for a NPD project. ...