In today's digital economy, knowledge is regarded as an asset, and the implementation of knowledge management supports a company in developing innovative products and making critical management strategic decisions. Product innovation must link technological competence such as engineering and process know-how with knowledge about the customer, so that the product will meet the customers' needs, in order to secure market acceptance. Even though the importance of knowledge management in the technological innovation of a product has long been recognized, its potential for customer knowledge management has not been widely researched.
To address the importance of the need of customer knowledge in innovative product development, this paper proposes an E-CKM model with a methodology for precisely delineating the process of customer knowledge management for innovative product development. In the knowledge management domain, an important task is the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, allowing information technology, such as web-based surveys and data mining to extract customer knowledge from different market segments. An empirical study applying the E-CKM model has been carried out, and it meets the evaluation criteria in a multiple-assessment scheme for showing a satisfactory result. The result is used in the decision making for innovative product development in order to reduce project risk and secure commercial success.
