A Logic of Tacit-needs Acquisition for Industrial Products

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate a tacit needs acquisition process for industrial products by salesforce organization. Considering innovation as a process of combining needs and seeds, the tacit needs acquisition process is valuable for innovation study. Salesforce organization is the interface between customer and company as seller and salesforce organization has a potential that is to acquire customer’s tacit needs based on company owned technologies. But existing studies point out that salesforce organization does not have enough knowledge related technology so salesforce organization is not able to acquire the tacit needs. Instead of the salesforce organization, R ＆ D organization can work to acquire the tacit needs because R ＆ D organization has deep technological knowledge. But this is not acceptable discussion because customer’s tacit needs is composed not only technological factors but also various environmental factors which customer is located. If R ＆ D organization can cope with the situation which is non-technological matter, it can work successfully but typical R ＆ D organization’s purpose is to focus on technology and product development so R ＆ D organization might not be able to handle this kind of activity. As an example of acquiring the tacit needs by salesforce organization, I analyzed foreign firm A’s salesforce organization case in industrial products. The reason for choosing firm A as the example case was firm A take customer’s tacit needs by salesforce organization in order to build a competitive advantage in unclear market. For case analysis, I built an analytical framework by utilizing knowledge on existing studies and analyzed the case. As a result, I found the hypothesis of the tacit needs acquisition process to be “credit, “belief”, “dialogue”, “virtual needs”, “realizing the tacit needs”. I also presented “dialogue within salesforce organization” as an important factor to encourage each process. The concept of “ dialogue within salesforce organization” promote “dialogue between salesforce organization and customer” and the tacit needs become obvious.