Paper info

Understanding the customer needs in business network: an emerging model in the diagnostic imaging industry

Leonardo Forzoni, Claudio Buffagni and Simone Guercini

The paper was published at the 35th IMP-conference in Paris, France in 2019.

This paper examines the problem of understanding the client for an actor working in the diagnostic imaging industry. This is a context characterized by some marked specificities, such as the high technological level, but even more so the high complexity of customer purchasing processes, which involve buyers as public and private organizations and who see in the role of influencer as well as of decision-makers in the medical community and in general of the scientific community interested in new technologies applied in the medical field. The paper provides an emerging empirical model produced by business managers in the diagnostic imaging industry, based on the role of relationships with clients and influencers to capture trends in the case of a crowded market with an extended presence of competitors, and characterized by extensive product complexity (regarding technical, application, user typology, scenarios of use, needs and request satisfaction capabilities). Such a model, which should be more comprehensively imaged as a full framework constituting and inspiring a cultural shift among the company, has been named “needs roadmap framework”. The definition of this needs roadmap and its interfacing of the product roadmap, will be presented and discussed. The understanding of what is called