A novel method for determining the key customer requirements and innovation goals in customer collaborative product innovation

Abstract

Customer collaborative production innovation (CCPI) has become a worldwide new product design trend. The essential step to implement CCPI is to clear customer requirements and innovation goals for products. Based on the integration of traditional competitive priority ratings of customer requirements method for quality function deployment and grey relational analysis, this paper proposes a novel hybrid competitive priority ratings of customer requirements method for CCPI to identify the key customer requirements and innovation goals for a product. The method takes the heterogeneity of customers into consideration and allows different types of customers to assess customer requirements in their preferred or familiar formats which reflect their uncertainty degree. The proposed hybrid competitive priority ratings of customer requirements method represents a general approach for CCPI, does not require any transformation of multiform customers’ assessments that would cause information loss or information distortion. Its potential applications in determining the key customer requirements and innovation goals for CCPI are illustrated with a case study of smart phone development.