The Hidden Needs of Users: Acceptance and Barriers of Using Ethnography for User-Driven Product Enhancement for SMEs in B2B Markets

摘要

Developing new and enhancing existing products are core drivers for the competitiveness,success,and survival of small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs),in particular in the B2B sector.However,recent studies found that 30% to 95% of newly launched products fail in the market.One of the reasons is the insufficient effort in customer-oriented research before the product lounge due to limited financial resources of SEMs,which are almost exclusively invested in technologically development.Especially when there are close links between the company and their customers,ethnography seems to have high potential to create deeper insights into handling routines of industrial goods at the point of use.Thus,small and midsized companies in B2B sectors are particularly suitable for the use of ethnographic methods for product innovation and improvement.It seems that managers in SMEs dealing with industrial goods are not aware of the potential of ethnographic research for gaining deeper insights into customer needs and requirements.The objective of this investigation is the examination of the acceptance and barriers of using ethnographic methods for the identification of latent customers'needs for the product development process in SMEs in B2B markets.