Automated extraction of customer needs from customer reviews for the enhancement of the innovative capacity

本研究项目的总体目标是通过对客户需求的准确识别来增强企业的创新能力。来自社交媒体的客户评论将被用作信息来源。一家公司的创新能力与其经济成就呈正相关。创新的成功离不开对客户需求的了解和相应的产品开发。客户需求源于主观上感觉到的短缺；它们是经济之前的，与对象没有直接关系。因此，客户需求可以与具体的客户需求和对所提供的产品或服务的需求区分开来。根据心理学和哲学关于需求上位概念的科学结果，客户需求被视为行动的动机触发因素。正因为如此，它们作为创新管理的投入尤其重要。收集和识别客户需求并不是一件轻而易举的事情，对公司来说是巨大的挑战。由于客户需求的部分潜在性，客户需求无法直接衡量和获取。确定客户需求的方法包括经验性研究的要素，例如经典调查或实地研究。然而，这些方法使得识别和收集客户需求的成本很高。到目前为止，社交媒体的评论还没有被广泛用作客户需求的信息来源。特别是以所谓的评论的形式，客户详细地描述他们对产品或与产品相关的服务的体验。在这样做时，客户不仅表达了他们对产品的偏好，而且还给出了深刻的见解，例如，他们为什么在需求满足方面更喜欢特定的产品功能。此外，客户在评审中描述他们的个人用例和个人环境。考虑到信息密度和可用信息量，对客户评论内容的分析对于创新管理显得尤为重要。然而，大量的可用数据决定了对评论的手动处理和分析。因此，本研究项目的目的是开发一种基于软件的算法，用于从审查中自动提取客户需求，作为创新管理的输入。

Overall objective of this research project is the enhancement of companies innovative capacity by the precise identification of customer needs. Customer reviews from social media will be used as source of information.A companys innovative capacity correlates positively with its economic achievement. Indispensable for an innovations success is especially the knowledge of customer needs and the according product development. Customer needs arise from a subjectively perceived shortage; they are pre-economic and not directly object-related. Customer needs can hence be differentiated from concrete customer requirements and demands regarding an offered product or service. On the basis of scientific results from psychology and philosophy concerning the superordinate concept of needs, customer needs are viewed as motivational triggers of action. For this reasons, they are especially relevant as input for the innovation management. The gathering and identification of customer needs is not trivial and poses great challenges for companies. Owing to their partly latent character, customer needs are not directly measurable and accessible. Methods for the identification of customer needs comprise of elements from empirical research, e.g. classical surveys or field studies. However, these methods render the identification and gathering of customer needs costly. To date, comments from Social Media have not been broadly used as source of information of customer needs. Especially in the form of so called reviews, customers describe their experiences with a product or product-related serviced in great details. In doing so, customer not only express their preferences concerning the product, but they also give a profound insight as e.g. why they prefer a specific product feature with regard to need satisfaction. Furthermore, customers describe their individual use cases and their personal environments within reviews. An analysis of the content of customer reviews appears especially valuable for the innovation management considering the information density and the amount of available information. Yet, the great amount of available data rules a manual processing and analysis of reviews out. Aim of this research project is therefore the development of a software-based algorithm for the automated extraction of customer needs from reviews as input for the innovation management.