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

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.