Customers can take an active role in the innovation process and provide their input (e.g., ideas, idea evaluations, or complaints) to the different phases of the innovation process. However, the management of a huge amount of unstructured customer input poses a challenge for companies. Existing software solutions focus on the early stages of idea management, and neglect the interoperability of tools, sharing, and reuse of customer inputs across innovation cycles and departments. Following the design science approach, we address this research gap by designing and evaluating a prototypical software platform, the “Customer Input Management System”. We derive functional and non-functional requirements that the software needs to meet from literature and by interviewing experts working in the fields of innovation management, product development, and marketing. The software provides practitioners with helpful functions for importing, exporting, tagging, and analyzing customer input to derive beneficial knowledge for innovation development.     «

Customers can take an active role in the innovation process and provide their input (e.g., ideas, idea evaluations, or complaints) to the different phases of the innovation process. However, the management of a huge amount of unstructured customer input poses a challenge for companies. Existing software solutions focus on the early stages of idea management, and neglect the interoperability of tools, sharing, and reuse of customer inputs across innovation cycles and departments. Following the de...     »