Automated extraction of customer needs from customer reviews for the enhancement of the innovative capacity

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Robert Heinrich Schmitt
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning ; Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 330451960

Overall objective of this research project is the enhancement of companies innovative capacity by the precise identification of customer needs. Customer reviews from social media will be used as source of information.A companys innovative capacity correlates positively with its economic achievement. Indispensable for an innovations success is especially the knowledge of customer needs and the according product development. Customer needs arise from a subjectively perceived shortage; they are pre-economic and not directly object-related. Customer needs can hence be differentiated from concrete customer requirements and demands regarding an offered product or service. On the basis of scientific results from psychology and philosophy concerning the superordinate concept of needs, customer needs are viewed as motivational triggers of action. For this reasons, they are especially relevant as input for the innovation management. The gathering and identification of customer needs is not trivial and poses great challenges for companies. Owing to their partly latent character, customer needs are not directly measurable and accessible. Methods for the identification of customer needs comprise of elements from empirical research, e.g. classical surveys or field studies. However, these methods render the identification and gathering of customer needs costly. To date, comments from Social Media have not been broadly used as source of information of customer needs. Especially in the form of so called reviews, customers describe their experiences with a product or product-related serviced in great details. In doing so, customer not only express their preferences concerning the product, but they also give a profound insight as e.g. why they prefer a specific product feature with regard to need satisfaction. Furthermore, customers describe their individual use cases and their personal environments within reviews. An analysis of the content of customer reviews appears especially valuable for the innovation management considering the information density and the amount of available information. Yet, the great amount of available data rules a manual processing and analysis of reviews out. Aim of this research project is therefore the development of a software-based algorithm for the automated extraction of customer needs from reviews as input for the innovation management.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants