A Kano-CKM model for customer knowledge discovery

Abstract In the digital economy, knowledge is regarded as an asset in an organization, and knowledge management (KM) implementation supports a company in developing innovative products and making critical management strategic decisions for business excellence. Customer relationship management (CRM) is an information-technology-enabling management tool, which manages the relationship with customers to understand, target, and attract them, with the objective of satisfying and retaining customers. Their synergy potential draws attention in the academic community and has led to the emergence of the customer knowledge management (CKM) model. In a knowledge management domain, an important task is the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, whereby the well-established Kano's Method has come up to demand and extract customer knowledge for attractive quality creation in new product development projects. As a consequence, this study proposes a Kano-CKM model with a methodology to delineate precisely the process of customer knowledge discovery for innovative product development. An industry level market research project applying the Kano-CKM model has been accomplished to present a satisfactory justification and will be described in the case study part of this article.