Social media and sensemaking patterns in new product development: demystifying the customer sentiment

Artificial intelligence by principle is developed to assist but also support decision making processes. In our study, we explore how information retrieved from social media can assist decision-making processes for new product development (NPD). We focus on consumers’ emotions that are expressed through social media and analyse the variations of their sentiments in all the stages of NPD. We collect data from Twitter that reveal consumers’ appreciation of aspects of the design of a newly launched model of an innovative automotive company. We adopt the sensemaking approach coupled with the use of fuzzy logic for text mining. This combinatory methodological approach enables us to retrieve consensus from the data and to explore the variations of sentiments of the customers about the product and define the polarity of these emotions for each of the NPD stages. The analysis identifies sensemaking patterns in Twitter data and explains the NPD process and the associated steps where the social interactions from customers can have an iterative role. We conclude the paper by outlining an agenda for future research in the NPD process and the role of the customer opinion through sensemaking mechanisms

Reverse – Green Virtual Enterprises and Their Breeding Environments: Closed-Loop Networks

Part 20: Sustainable Collaborative Networks IInternational audienceGreen Virtual Enterprise Breeding Environments and their Reverse-Green Virtual Enterprises, as dynamic reverse supply networks, represent a promising paradigm to face the reverse logistics and end-of-life manufacturing challenges towards closed-loop industrial processes, closed-loop supply networks and sustainable industrial development models. This paper explores different collaborative product recovery business opportunities and strategies for capturing current missed value at the end-of-lifecycle with new activities, relationships and network configurations, put forward based on the disciplines of Industrial Ecology, Collaborative Networks and Lifecycle Management