Sharing customer needs is one of the central issues of corporate management whatever industry a firm is in. It will provide not only better products or services for their customers but also efficiency of product or service development. Although, since sharing information requires certain cost, a firm has to implement some effective ways to share it at the minimum cost. This paper attempts to show the way of thinking to examine the cost of sharing customer needs from the viewpoint of information stickiness. The hypotheses are provided from three points which explain the concept of information stickiness: amount of information, attributes of an information transmitter and receiver, nature of information to be transferred. For empirical understanding, we organized a questionnaire survey at a large Japanese SI-firm and following facts are found. Firstly, we found the fact that the information route to acquire customer needs appeared in the firm is different from a linear processing model. From this result, we can reasonably assume that customer needs is somewhat "sticky" information. Taking this stickiness into consideration, we then focused on the ability gap between an information transmitter and receiver, and classified it into two types: the overstrain-gap which arises in case of transmitters' ability surpasses receivers' ability and the waste-gap as the opposite case. An analysis showed that only the former one negatively affects to organizational information sharing but latter one showed no or little effect on it. Additionally, it was founded that media richness theory, richer medium such as face to face communication is more efficient to convey sticky information than using lean medium such as document, would not be applicable to the ability gap. From these findings, what is worthy of attention is considered to be lifting receivers' ability to acquire customer needs. An additional analysis suggested that its ability would be nurtured by information exchanges in the course of ones' work.
