Abstract
Innovation is one of the most important factors for a firm’s long term success. Due to increasing customer expectations and a growing international competition companies are forced to offer a huge product variety and at the same time reduce the product life cycles. However, different studies prove that the success rate of innovation efforts is still poor! The market success rate of new products or services can be increased only by a strict orientation at the customer value. This paper presents a new methodology for the systematic identification of logical patterns and the logical derivation of potential areas of customer benefit in business-to business relationships from which functional requirements for the product development can be derived. The approach is based on the combination of Delphi techniques with Axiomatic Design and aims to the systematic identification of share-/stakeholders and customer’s benefits and requirements. An example taken from the durable goods industry helps to illustrate the successful application of this approach.