Need Information
April 8, 2011 at 9:00 pm by admin
Needs information refers to the needs and preferences of customers or users. It can also include information about explicit as well as latent needs. Needs information is important for innovative processes (Which need should an innovation fulfill?) as well as for operational processes in production and marketing management (Which variation should be manufactured in which amount and where are the buyers for these variations located?).
Needs information stands for the efficiency of labor. Innovation or, in other words, producing an invention successfully, is not an end in itself but is necessary for adapting a product or a service to changing customer needs. Keeping this in mind sheds some light on why a technologically mature product is not the only important factor here. More importantly, customers must be able to recognize that the new product actually solves their needs better than existing products. If customers do not recognize this, or the new product does not satisfy customer needs, then the product will most likely end up being a commercial flop. The flop rate of innovative projects is drastically reduced by taking customer needs into consideration at the beginning of the product development process. In this way, meeting specific customer demands can be acted upon effectively. Similar argumentation also applies to marketing measures and planning actual production volumes effectively. Both measures depend upon customer needs information in order to be successful. Therefore, effective action aims at developing, producing, and distributing the "right" goods and services.
Bearers of Needs Information
Bearers of needs information are mainlycustomers and users. Integrating customers and users should help a supplier increase the efficiency of its value creation process—that is, by helping the supplier do the “right” things. The spectrum of activities performed by collaborating companies and customers can be understoodas a continuum. One extreme on the continuum is customer-dominated value creation; the other extreme is dominated entirely by the manufacturer. These two extremes are best described by comparing the "Customer-Active Paradigm"(CAP) to the traditional"Manufacturing-Active Paradigm" (MAP) (von Hippel 1986). In CAP, customers dominate the value creation process entirely; they perform all value creation tasks completely and autonomously. MAP is equivalent to a traditional case of internally-focused, autonomously-performed value creation performed by a company.
