Abstract
Since the new service development (NSD) has attracted most of service firm’s attention, how to effectively manage the development process is very important. Especially in the front-end stage of the NSD, some of the development teams try to involve customer in the process in order to reducing cycle times and optimizing new services. However, the effectively use of obtained knowledge from customer interaction will depend on the new service development team’s (NSD team) capacity. The social capital has long been recognized can positively affect the knowledge management. Customer knowledge is accepted as a key strategic resource to improve innovation and to coordinate with emerging market trend, though most of the service firms still unwilling to collect knowledge from customers for they don’t know how to interact with customers correctly. Over the past research, the actual front-end activities have not been in-depth studied, in addition, how to convert the obtained information into usable knowledge is another neglected research issues. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how enterprises proceed to customer knowledge acquisition, sharing and utilization in the front-end stage of NSD. To answer these questions, we combine insights from extant literature and use case research method to investigate the interaction activities between customers and the new service development team (NSD team). The findings suggest that there are various sources and interfaces can help the NSD team to collect customer knowledge, however, if they want to effectively use the obtained knowledge, the social capital of the team have a major influence on the customer knowledge management among team members.