Social Media in the Product Development Process of the Automotive Industry: A New Approach

This paper introduces a new methodology for implementing social media monitoring into an important stage of the innovation process within the automotive industry — the prototype stage. The information gathered on social media channels was used for project management, quality management and idea-generation purposes in order to support the parallel development of future generations of electric vehicles. As the project is still ongoing the first general results which show the effectiveness of the methodology can be presented in this paper.