Despite the widely accepted and proven benefits of open innovation methods, companies apply them infrequently in their own product development processes. In order to find reasons for this apparently contradiction, we conducted 34 interviews with project directors and a literature study. Thus, we identified ten common obstacles for customer integration. On this basis, we derived a new open innovation method to get over these hurdles. The core idea of the presented crowd sourcing method is a product picture based access to a comment management database by the product user. To illuminate the method, we present an implementation together with its internal data structure for a better understanding. This tool is then validated in an experiment with n=48 users. The results indicate that the picture based approach of the method generates valuable results that can contribute to product development.     «

Despite the widely accepted and proven benefits of open innovation methods, companies apply them infrequently in their own product development processes. In order to find reasons for this apparently contradiction, we conducted 34 interviews with project directors and a literature study. Thus, we identified ten common obstacles for customer integration. On this basis, we derived a new open innovation method to get over these hurdles. The core idea of the presented crowd sourcing method is a produ...     »