Customer Feedback for Startups – A Process Model and Research Agenda

The focus of the submission is to discuss concepts of early customer integration for startups. Recent literature suggests various concepts that aim to integrate customers in the development as well as in the testing of a startups product- and service ideas. Two popular concepts include the Lean Startup (Ries, 2011) and the Customer Development (Blank, 2013). While both concepts refer to certain activities undertaken by startups during the product development process these have not been empirically investigated and tested so far. Against this background, one aim of this study is to analyze both concepts in more detail so as to derive a detailed process model for developing and testing startup ideas. The thereby derived process model, referred to as customer feedback process, provides a first integrated model that researchers as well as practitioners can use to further investigate the phenomenon of customer integration for startups. Moreover, this research examines the extent to which individual process steps of the customer feedback process are supported by current IT solutions as IT bears great potential to support as well as enable entrepreneurship (Del Giudice & Straub, 2011). Based on the findings of this study, the paper further demonstrates important areas for future research concerning "IT support for customer feedback".