The effect of stakeholder inertia on product line requirements

One of the goals of requirements engineering is to capture and document innovation in the form of new product requirements. These product requirements need to express new system functions or new qualities that are most desired by customers while maintaining customer familiarity with existing products. This paper explores the contradiction between the customer desire for revolutionary advancement and their desire to maintain familiarity with existing systems. This customer inertia creates a bias toward incremental (evolutionary) advancement, potentially multiplying the risks associated with revolutionary innovations. We present a review of scenarios illustrating this stakeholder bias and propose a research agenda for further work in the area.