1 A NEW METHODOLOGY BASED ON KANO MODEL FOR THE EVALUATION OF A NEW PRODUCT ACCEPTABILITY DURING THE FRONT-END PHASES HELMI BEN REJEB Nancy University, ERPI laboratory (Innovative Processes Research Team), ENSGSI 8, rue Bastien Le Page, Nancy, 54010, France, helmi.ben-rejeb@ensgsi.inpl-nancy.fr LAURE MOREL-GUIMARAES VINCENT BOLY Nancy University, ERPI laboratory (Innovative Processes Research Team), ENSGSI 8, rue Bastien Le Page, Nancy, 54010, France, Laure.Morel@ensgsi.inpl-nancy.fr Vincent.Boly@ensgsi.inpl-nancy.fr Overview: It is extremely important for companies, which are working on developing innovative products, to know their customers needs and wants. Moreover, the earlier they know these needs, the greater their chances will be to succeed. This work proposes a new methodology to identify these needs and to assess the products answering to them and their acceptability. The proposed methodology is based on the Kano model to evaluate the needs. As for the Kano model, the method classifies the needs on three categories, “Must-be”, “One-dimensional” and “Attractive” needs. The originality of this work consists on the way that the classification is obtained. Matrix calculations are used to obtain “functional” and “dysfunctional” scores for each need. Then a mapping for these needs is plotted. It can be used as decision aid tool for selecting the needs. It can help to decide which are the features to be developed to respond to these needs. The same methodology is used to compare several products profiles. Each profile responds to a combination of needs. The aim of this article is to describe the methodology aspects and its steps. Experimentations are needed for validation. Keywords: Innovation, Front-End phases, Needs, Product profile Acceptability, Kano model, Decision Aid Introduction Unlike human individual, companies may prosper for several decades. Their capacity to survive, to develop and to prosper depends on their organization and on the management process they adopt (Iansiti and West, 1999). It depends also on their capacity to follows the news trends and the new behaviors of their customers. They have to think on new products constantly. Therefore innovativeness is a “must-be” capability for most organizations (Börjesson et al., 2006). In the other hand, after analyzing different examples of new product development processes (NPDP) different researchers found that companies have suffered from a high failure rate of their new products. At the beginning of the 90’s, Cooper stated that only one product development project in four become a winner, and almost 50% of the resources that American firms devoted to innovation was spent on product that were commercial failures (Cooper, 1990). More recently Stevens and Burely found that it could take as many as 3000 ideas to produce one successful product (Stevens and Burely, 1997). This high failure rate focus on the importance of selecting the best ideas, avoiding spending resources for unsuccessful products. It is also important to choose the right measurements indexes to identify whether the project is taking the right path to success or not. Griffin and Page recommended some measures for the product development process success (Griffin and Page, 1996). They recognize that no single measure is enough for assessing the success of a product development project. The adequate measure depends on the project strategy scenario and the whole business strategy scenario. Griffin et Page considered the Booz, Allen and Hamilton classification of project strategies according to their newness to the company and newness to the market (Booz et al., 1982). “Customer satisfaction” and “Customer acceptance” were cited as the first or the second important measure of the customer-based measure of project success. Others measures can be “Market Share” or “Revenue Growth”.