The Impact of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) on the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of New Product Development and New Product Development performance in defense area

Open innovation relies on external knowledge sources such as customers, and Customer knowledge has been neglected in researches about Iranian Defense Industry.In addition, new product failure rate is hight in defense industries. This study aimes to investigate the impact of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) on the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of New Product Development and New Product Development (NPD) performance. This is a survey and descriptive study.considering the literature of the study, conseptual models and the hypothesis were pesented. In the second step to evaluate the models and the hypothesis a questionare was desingned and elites opinions through the users of defence products were included.using relative categorized method, the sampel memebers were selected among the users of new defence products. The analysis of the data through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) showed that there is a positive and significant correlation between customer knowledge management (knowledge from, about and for customer) with perfomnce of the new product development and critical sources factors. Also the relation between the knowledge “from” and the knowledge “about “with critical Success factors was confirmed but the knowledge “for” customers was not confirmed. The results shows that adopting customer management knowledge in the process of developing new defence products has a great impact on new product development.