Supporting a Structured Customer Orientation

The development of new products is necessary in order to ensure a company´s survival. But, if badly planned, this also could lead to a corporate crisis. An early customer and competition orientation results in need-based and competitive products and is therefore considered as an essential requirement for innovation success. However, due to a lack of know how concerning the application of appropriate instruments, especially small and medium sized enterprises face big challenges. In this report, the development of a method kit is introduced, which supports a customer and competition oriented product development process during the early innovation phase by providing a suitable and applicable collection of methods in order to implement the development process in practice.