Collaboration for Innovation: A Product Management Perspective

When it comes to the development of new products, the product management has to encourage collaboration throughout all shareholders. The higher the number of shareholders, the higher the challenges towards cost, development time, delay, quality, and communication. This task has become even more difficult since social networks and online communities have gained popularity as a customer-driven innovation management (innovation pull). On the on hand social media facilitate a collaborative approach towards new product development, on the other hand they represent an additional artefact in the innovation process. In this paper we analyze the changed requirements towards the product management process and suggest a model that can help product managers to more efficiently assimilate information generated in the collaborative