How to capture hidden customer needs in an industrial product development company : A case study at Xylem

Sammanfattning: When product development is becoming more and more complex, development costs rising and shorter development times are demanded, it is becoming obvious that a good customer understanding is essential. Previous research has showed that those companies that wish to develop radically new products must work actively with the identification of their customers‘ hidden needs. The goal of this master thesis project has been to determine how an industrial product development company should proceed with the investigation of hidden customer needs. The purpose of the paper has been to evaluate existing processes, frameworks, and methods and then propose an optimal solution for the case company. The methodology for this master thesis has been a case study at Xylem where interviews with employees have been conducted in parallel with an examination of existing literature within the field. Xylem is an industrial product development company that develops water pumps for many different applications. Apart from interviews a workshop and field tests have been conducted to get a better picture of the case company‘s situation and to verify the proposed methods. The result was a proposed process in five steps, well integrated in Xylem‘s existing process for business development, together with methods which, taken from literature, have been developed especially for the identification of hidden customer needs. The proposal is based on barriers and constraints found in the empirical study. Many of the barriers were also identified in literature which led to the conclusion that similar companies will face many of the same problems. The result of the field tests showed that the proposed methods were successful according to the employees conducting them. They were perceived to be a good tool for Xylem to identify their customers‘ hidden needs and increase the innovative capability, thus increasing the chance of developing successful radically new products. Keywords: hidden customer needs, customer oriented innovation, voice of the customer, radical product development