Activity-based process model for customer-driven product development

Due to increased customer demands and shortened product life cycles, industrial mass-producers receive an increasing amount of customer requests. The requests have various degrees of complexity requiring engineering changes to existing products or development of new products depending on the nature of the request. Managing this process is termed customer-driven Product Development (PD). In order to increase process performance, an activity-based process model should be utilized. However, existing process models do not consider this special case of integration between collaborative PD and customer-initiated engineering change management. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore customer-driven PD to develop new insights into an increasingly relevant PD process. The paper includes an embedded case study of a large industrial mass-producer and its customers. The paper contributes to existing research proposing a process model for customer-driven PD adding new knowledge to PD research.