Capturing product/service improvement ideas from social media based on lead user theory

Capturing valuable product/service improvement ideas is helpful for the development of new features. However, the existing methods for capturing such improvement ideas have the disadvantages of high cost, long time lag, information overload, and difficulty in getting a response. We propose an innovative framework based on lead user theory for capturing product/service improvement ideas from user-generated content on social media (henceforth called “chatter”). To identify the chatter containing improvement ideas, we design a machine-learning-based imbalanced classification model. Additionally, we use text summarization technology to get a rough sense of improvement ideas from the selected chatter. We validate the proposed framework by a case study in the automotive industry. The results demonstrate that the ideas extracted by our framework are breakthrough innovative, useful, feasible, and adoptable.