The intensive concern with customer needs and problems is one of the key contributors to the success of innovation management. During the seventies, numerous procedures were developed, in theory as well as in practice. These procedures entered literature as so called need-assessment approaches...

In this study we research user integration in the German service industry. Goal is to explorethe industrial practice with regard to four dimensions of user integration, i.e., why, whom,how, and how successful the service industry integrates to find novel service ideas. Data iscollected from a...

Motivation of this paper is to discuss that the open source model of innovation does not only seem practical in the software industry, but also in various other industrial contexts. We develop the concept of Open Source Innovation (OSI) as a generalisation of the open source model of software...

Innovations have acquired a key-role in the growth and competition strategies of firms today.They are regarded as an essential tool to stimulate growth and enable firms to master thecompetition brought about by the forces of globalization. In developed countries they arethought to provide a...

The wide-ranging economic developments of the previous decade, e.g. the integration ofworld economies, have made a significant impact towards increasing the mobility of theworking populace and their families. At the same time, technological developments especiallyin the field of...

The rapid progress of electronic technology in recent decades has led to an increased technicalcomplexity and wide functionality of many products. As a result man-machine interfaces,such as displays became more and more important, wherefore investments and technicalprogress in these technologies...

Companies are starting to recognize the need to build a virtual community. They want toachieve a brought range of goals but face different, more demanding requirements whenbuilding a virtual community than do other providers. To give companies a guideline on howto establish their own virtual...

There is an increasing number of researchers conducting empirical and theoretical investigations tobetter understand innovation and protection activities of service companies. In fact, previous analysesreveal that the protection topic is difficult to study, particularly when using traditional...

This paper presents results of an empirical large-scale study on uncertainty reduction of R&Dprojects and R&D project selection. The empirical field is the German automotive supplierindustry. We explore R&D project selection practices in this specific industry and briefly contrastour findings...

This paper analyzes the impact of the virtual tool 'crash simulation' on automotive R&D over thelast 35 years. The research carried out in this context identifies and investigates distinct phasesrespectively stages of the potential of crash simulations based on the Finite Element Method and...