Mining Of Text In The Product Development Process

Abstract

In the prevailing world economy, competition is keen and firms need to have an edge over their competitors for profitability and sometimes, even for the survival of the business itself. One way to help achieve this is the capability for rapid product development on a continual basis. However, this rapidity must be accomplished without compromising vital information and feedback that are necessary. The compromise in such information and feedback at the expense of speed may result in counter-productive outcomes, thereby offsetting or even negating whatever profits that could have been derived. New ways, tools and techniques must be found to deliver such information. The widespread availability of databases within the Product Development Process (PDP) facilitates the use of data mining as one of the tools. Thus far, most of the studies on data mining within PDP have emphasised on numerical databases. Studies focusing on textual databases in this context have been relatively few. The research direction is to study real-life cases where textual databases can be mined to obtain valuable information for PDP. One suitable candidate identified for this is “voice of the customer” databases.