Evaluation of multicultural factors from elicited customer requirements for new product development

Globalisation has been characterised as one of the recent trends in new product development (NPD), in which multicultural factors, in particular, dominate the initial step of product development. Moreover, the voice of customers has been widely accepted as an important source of input to subsequently obtain design metrics and specifications in the early stage of product concept design. For this purpose, customer requirements elicitation and management will determine the success level of an organisation's NPD and benchmarking. Hence, multicultural factors are the most difficult issues for organisations to address, even with the assistance of today's advanced computer systems. It has, accordingly, been one of the future directions in NPD. However, in practice, there are few successful or effective techniques available for the evaluation of multicultural factors in customer requirements. This paper aims at realising a prototype system that combines the strengths of the laddering technique and the radial basis function (RBF) neural network for customer requirements acquisition and multicultural factors evaluation. The performance of the prototype system was illustrated using a case study on mobile hand phone design. The results are discussed in detail.