Importance Calculation of Customer Requirements for Incremental Product Innovation

Incremental product innovation is achieved by finding and solving problems of existing products. The importance of customer requirements reflects the severity of existing product problems, which points out the direction for incremental product innovation. In this research, the calculation process of customer requirement importance mainly includes three steps. Firstly, from the perspective of customers, the improvement gap analytical method is used to obtain the improvement and original importance of customer requirements by measuring customer perceived satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Secondly, from the perspective of industry experts, an improved interval grey number ranking method is proposed to calculate the basic importance of customer requirements, which can deal with the inadequate problem of the data provided by experts due to the limited number of experts. Finally, a multi-dimensional vector cosine method, which avoids the interference of subjectivity of importance weight calculation to the final importance, is proposed to integrate the importance data provided by customers and experts. A case of a water purifier is considered to illustrate the validity of the proposed process. This research improves existing calculation methods and proposes an integrated calculation process from three dimensions to calculate the final importance of customer requirements effectively.