Knowledge Management in Customer Integration: A Customer Input Ontology

Exchanging and analyzing customer input across different departments and software tools in a company is a prerequisite to successfully implement the co-creation of innovations with customers. Ontologies pose helpful tools to support knowledge representation and retrieval in a company. Prior research has developed ontology based frameworks to manage idea generation and assessment in the early phases of the innovation process. However, these approaches do not address the holistic management of customer input across all phases of the innovation process. Based on a review of existing ontologies as well as types and characteristics of customer input, we develop the customer input ontology. With competency questions we show how the ontology might be used to generate knowledge and value of generated customer input in form of ideas, concepts, or feedback. The customer input ontology supports knowledge management in customer integration since it provides a common language and format to collect and save customer input in a structured manner. Further, the customer input ontology allows the tracking and reuse of customer input throughout different departments and innovation cycles.