Exploring Strategies for Capturing Customer's Tacit Knowledge in Customer Integration Methods

Ulrich Bretschneider and Shkodran Zogaj
Additional contact information
Ulrich Bretschneider: Department of Information Systems, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
Shkodran Zogaj: Department of Information Systems, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany

International Journal of Knowledge Management (IJKM), 2016, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-19

Abstract: In many instances, customers are seen as one of the key resources for new product development (NPD), as they often have deep product knowledge, either in the form of explcit or tacit knowledge. Firms' NPD departments are highly interested in internalizing these forms of customer knowledge with the help of customer integration methods, such as Ideas Competitions, Lead-User-Workshops etc. However, research analyzing how these methods enable transfer of customer's tacit knowledge – which can hardly be expressed – has been neglected. Thus, scholars are constantly calling for research that focuses on understanding the tacit knowledge transfer processes by means of customer integration methods. This research identifies a total of 15 methods with the help of a systematic literature review. By then systematically analyzing these methods, authors found that six of these methods make use of two major strategies to internalise customer's tacit knowledge: Story Telling-Strategy and Observing Customer Activities-Strategy. The rest of these methods do not allow for capturing customer's tacit knowledge at all. Based on these insights, authors derived valuable implications for NPD practice on how each of these methods can leverage tacit knowledge from customers more efficiently.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://services.igi-global.com/resolvedoi/resolve. ... 4018/IJKM.2016040101 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:igg:jkm000:v:12:y:2016:i:2:p:1-19

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Knowledge Management (IJKM) is currently edited by Hakikur Rahman

More articles in International Journal of Knowledge Management (IJKM) from IGI Global
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journal Editor ().