Customer Knowledge Co-creation Process in New Product Development

Customer knowledge has been increasingly accepted as a key strategic resource in any company's success. It has been recognized in marketing as a significant resource that can be managed to support R&D, to improve innovation, to facilitate the 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 in an organization, but they are weak in converting the information to knowledge, because knowledge is strongly related to a person or a group of people. Knowledge management (KM) 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. This paper promotes the framework to describe the customer knowledge flow in the every stages of NPD process to co-create the customer knowledge, by the interaction of the knowledge agent from the company with the customer. This will fill the lack of understanding of CKM implementation in NPD.