Requirement Profiles as a Foundation for customer-centric Ideation in Business-to-Business Markets

Abstract

While innovation has always been a central success factor for companies, it has steadily gained in importance over the past 10 years. The current flood of terms such as disruption, individualization, digitalization and transformation are all directly related to the necessities of companies for innovation and show its relevance. The Kano model explains why repetitive innovations in the form of new products and product generations with innovative features are necessary to succeed on the market. According to the Kano model, excitement features downgrade to performance and basic features over time. Therefore, additional excitement features are necessary for gaining market share in new products and product generations [1]. Excitement features often satisfy unfulfilled customer needs. Identifying these customer needs in business-to-business (B2B) markets and finding ideas for new features is challenging – especially in the mechanical engineering industry. This research presents a new stakeholder-centered method that utilizes requirement profiles in order to face these issues during product design ideation. The aim of the method is to facilitate the identification of unexpressed stakeholder needs in order to find ideas for new features in B2B markets. Moreover, the new method takes a customer view and concentrates on identifying stakeholder objectives, tasks, and problems of buying center stakeholders as foundation for ideation. In accordance with this method, ideas are found by following consecutive steps within a systematic path, which can be integrated into a workshop approach. This leads to the advantage of a systematic traceability from customer needs to features – which supports innovative systems design. In addition, the modelling of requirement profiles is described, which enables further use in systems engineering. An application of the method in mechanical engineering industry is presented.