Building an evaluation system through user practices

In new product development, incorporating user evaluations into product requirements is an important challenge. Particularly in highly specialized medical domains, it is difficult for corporate representatives to gain the same experience of use as users. Therefore, it is not easy to translate users’ practice-based knowledge into product requirements and secure the resources necessary to advance development. This paper clarifies how, under these constraints, corporate representatives guide users’ practice-based knowledge into a form that can be utilized in product development and achieve resource mobilization. To examine this issue, this paper analyzes a case study of the development of a surgical training model led by a medical device manufacturer. The analysis found that the corporate representative (broker) developed an “evaluation system” to derive generalizable product requirements from the diverse practice-based knowledge of surgeons, obtained through many years of observation in surgical settings. Existing research on network brokerage has explained that brokers play the role of connecting heterogeneous information, existing knowledge, and people. However, this paper elucidates the process by which brokers not only connect people and knowledge but also, through the medium of an evaluation system they have developed themselves, justify resource mobilization (technological collaboration and funding acquisition) and realize the product concept. Through this process, we present the dynamics of network brokerage, in which different actors are gradually connected through the evaluation system to realize the product concept.