The Success of Product and Process Innovation Generated From Customer Knowledge Management

The success of product and process innovations is warmly welcomed by companies in order to enhance their competitive advantage. Therefore companies would like to generate successful product and process innovations. Product/process innovation is very important for in the current highly competitive market, but the initial idea generation process for the success of product/process innovation is still an ambiguous process. Therefore this research attempts to establish the initial process for a successful product and process innovation. Customer knowledge management is a technique which can be used to start the initial stage of a successful innovation generation process, followed by employee idea generation, and finalized with the desired outcome "successful product/process innovation". A structural equation modelling (SEM) is used to examine the relationship between the customer knowledge management (CKM), the employee idea generation, and the success of product/process innovation. A questionnaire was used to collect data from the top ten high performance international manufacturing firms which have manufacturing plants located in Thailand. Result indicates that the customer knowledge management direct influence on the employee idea generation, and the output of the employee idea generation is the success product/process innovation.