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An Approach to Incremental Innovation Theories and Its Methods in Industrial Product Development

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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN, ICED’07 28 - 31 AUGUST 2007, CITÉ DES SCIENCES ET DE L'INDUSTRIE, PARIS, FRANCE

AN APPROACH TO INCREMENTAL INNOVATION THEORIES AND ITS METHODS IN INDUSTRIAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
Hannu Oja Tampere University of Technology ABSTRACT A quest for powerful tools to support creation of innovative solutions exists in industry. Majority of development efforts aims for incremental development of products, either by means of improved performance in use or during manufacturing process. New concepts or solutions on product’s functionality and behaviour (behaviour meaning how the functionality is delivered, response) are needed to bring benefits. Generic product development theories, models and methods are applicable for new product development, as their approach is linear and founded on functional requirements and means to execute them. However, in industry the product development activities preferably start from existing product or concept with pre-determined goals rather than from scratch. Creativity techniques and multidisciplinary workgroups have been referred in literature as means for creating innovations. However, these methods lack context of technical system and are general in nature and could be used for any problem with assistance of experienced moderator and a group of individuals. These techniques and methods are not included in this study. An approach from retrospective case study is presented. It was found that the mental process of an innovator follows more problem solving theory than design theory. However, the structuring and verbalization of the problem, in which constraints and resources are considered, do not include multidisciplinary view of different technologies. A new approach is developed based on the assumption of the inventor’s mental process. However, further study is required to develop a method, which

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