Rethinking Design: The Formal Integration of Engineering

1 Copyright © 2011 by ASME

RETHINKING DESIGN: THE FORMAL INTEGRATION OF ENGINEERING INNOVATION INTO A DESIGN PROCESS

Aziz M. Naim

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

University at Buffalo - SUNY Buffalo, NY 14260

[email protected]

Kemper E. Lewis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace

Engineering University at Buffalo - SUNY

Buffalo, NY 14260 Corresponding Author [email protected]

ABSTRACT Innovation has been a hallmark of progress throughout human history. There are many innovative products that have had a tremendous impact on mankind’s quality of life. As engineering design matures into a field defined by scientific principles, there is a need for guidelines to help the designer select and apply appropriate tools and methods to support the development of innovative products. There has been significant work developing design methods to support the development of innovative products as well as to understand the characteristics of the innovative products. Many of these methods however present themselves as a unique solution to develop innovative products but fail to fully define innovation. Furthermore, few guidelines are provided to the designer as to when to use the available tools with respect to the market dynamics, making the use of these methods sometimes ineffective. With a general push for US companies to become increasingly more innovative, it is important more than ever to understand and situate innovation in design practices in order to promote successful and consistent development of innovative products. This paper proposes a set of new "innovation for engineers" guidelines that are defined and used along existing engineering design theory and cyberinfrastructure design tools in a design process. 1 INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION Throughout the 20th century, the United States was a strong inventive nation. A strong business climate was maintained to promote the value of innovation and reinforce Americans' frontier spirit that sees obstacles as challenges to be overcome. However, with the shifting of the global economy, today's American economy is in danger of losing its innovation edge. Consequently, there is a national push for US companies to become increasingly more innovative in order to remain an industrial leader in the world [1-2].

Innovation is broadly defined as being the introduction of something new, being a new idea, method or device [3]. From the dawn of civilization, humans have adapted to the environment surrounding them through creative problem solving. Innovation is applied to nearly all human activity, thus making it unique across different disciplines. This diverse uniqueness is the major obstacle to a universal cross disciplinary approach that generates innovation. Consequently, this paper focuses on engineering innovation only, and future use of the word “innovation” will exclusively refer to that subset of innovation unless otherwise specified. Innovation does not happen by itself, rather it necessitates “creative thinking”. Thompson defines creative thinking to be associated with randomness, imagination, irregularity and sensuality, which is the opposite of deductive thinking that engineers typically use [4]. A popular definition of innovation is the measure of potential disruption a product can generate in a technological and marketing frame [5]. Different typologies exist to classify innovation and can be summarized as either incremental or disruptive. Incremental innovation pertains to any product that improves upon existing ones. Disruptive innovation pertains to a product that disrupts the current state of the market and/or technology. Both require creativity that is considered useful by the consumer. This means that a great technological invention is not sufficient enough to provide an innovative product. There needs to be an adequate market that will identify the potential product as a “must have”. This can happen for various reasons: maybe the need that is addressed has not been fulfilled adequately by current technology, or maybe the company succeeds in presenting the product as an innovative product by identifying a "dormant" need without implementing brand new technology. No matter what the reason is, companies are still faced with elevated risk when

Proceedings of the ASME 2011 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference

IDETC/CIE 2011 August 28-31, 2011, Washington, DC, USA

DETC2011-48381


designing for innovation. Consequently, many potentially innovative products are left at the mercy of traditional, somewhat outdated and shortsighted corporate practices. Corporate executives need a clear innovation metric for engineering in order to better situate the myriad of projects and better allocate their R&D funding. Recent research shows that there is no correlation between R&D spending and successful, innovative products [6-8]. In fact, companies that tend to invest more still fail to be innovative in their product deliverance compared to others that spend less. Table 1 illustrates the results of a study done by Global Innovation 1000 which tracks companies that spend the most on innovation. The survey asked innovation leaders and companies to name the three companies they considered most innovative in the world and Apple came in as the clear leader followed by Google and 3M. However, Apple's intensity in R&D spending is only 3.1%, which corresponds to less than half the average percentage of the computing and electronics industry [9]. Consequently, success is not characterized by how much you spend but by how you spend the resources with respect to company strategy.

Table 1: The 10 most innovative companies in 2010 [10]

R&D Spending 2009 $US mil.

Sales 2009 $US mil.

Intensity (Spending as % of sales)

Apple $1,333 $42,905 3.1% Google $2,843 $23,651 12.0% 3M $1,293 $23,123 5.6% GE $3,300 $155,777 2.1% Toyota $7,822 $204,363 3.8% Microsoft $9,010 $58,437 15.4% P&G $2,044 $79,029 2.6% IBM $5,820 $95,759 6.1% Samsung $6,002 $109,541 5.5% Intel $5,653 $35,127 16.1%

Companies that claim to be innovative are classified as either "first movers" or "fast followers" [11-13]. Both strategies have their advantages and disadvantages. First movers enter the market first and also have the potential to acquire or maintain their "innovative" brand image. Fast followers on the other hand can capitalize on the first mover's disadvantage, being a higher risk of failure. By addressing early consumer dissatisfaction of the first mover's product, the company that follows can release an improved product with a lower risk of failure, and thus claim the "innovative" brand image from the first mover company. However, if the first mover succeeds, the follower remains behind. When Apple entered the portable media market with the first iPod, it capitalized on general consumer dissatisfaction which were poor user interfaces, and lack of high capacity storage. Although not instant, Apple's success can be attributed to the

fact that they listened to the consumers and acted in order to address their needs [14]. More recently, the iPad's success in a virtually non-existent market points to the fact that Apple is doing something right when releasing new products. Thus the question that needs to be answered is how can a company such as Apple consistently deliver successful innovative products [15]? From a corporate perspective, it is important for the company to provide a healthy environment in order to nurture innovation. As discussed in the following section, various research in the fields of management has focused on helping companies innovate corporate-wide. However, there still is a lack of research enabling consistent innovation in engineering. Hence the need to support innovation in design by trying to provide some sort of qualitative and quantitative metrics [16]. Innovation is not dependent solely on good corporate practices, it needs to be understood and effectively incorporated in the engineering design process. Building upon an already available framework that leverages various IT tools for early design exploration [17], this paper reexamines the design process and provides a new dimension to new product development throughout the design process. In the following section, we try to define innovation in the context of new product development. In Section 3, we briefly review previous work in the engineering design community regarding innovation and creativity. A standard design process is then revisited in Section 4 and various guidelines are proposed to encourage innovation. In Section 5, we provide some general discussion, conclusion and future work regarding the proposed guidelines. 2 WHAT IS INNOVATION? This section presents previous research in trying to define innovation that is leveraged for the purpose of incorporating a new "innovation" dimension in an engineering design process. 2.1 Innovation taxonomy The challenge for engineers in measuring innovation arises from the lack of a proper understanding and definition of the different innovation types. Engineers need a consistent typology for innovation in order to advance their knowledge of it. This shortcoming has been addressed in [5], where the authors stress the importance of a consistent terminology and propose the following classification schema for innovation: it can be either "radical", "really new", or "incremental". The first two classes are similar to each other as they both generate a disruption. However, "really new" innovation disrupts either the market, or the technology, whereas "radical" innovation disrupts both the market and technology simultaneously [18]. This distinction is important as it allows engineers as well as chief executives to better understand the impact the disruptive innovation can have on the current state of technology and market. "Incremental" innovation on the other hand pertains to


products that improve a given technology in an already existing market [19].

Figure 1: The evolution of the phone

Figure 1 is one example that illustrates the taxonomy proposed in [5]. The invention of the first phone was a radical innovation that disrupted the technology in providing a new way to communicate and also disrupted the market as it allowed the development of new services. Subsequent innovations improved the already available phone by reducing the size and cost while increasing the reliability and performance. The next radical innovation came with the invention of the cell phone. When the first cell phone was being developed, the technological breakthrough that allowed mobility was accompanied by the creation of a new market. Similar to the phone, subsequent incremental innovations reduced the size and cost while increasing its performance and reliability. This example provides a broad view on how an invention, which creates a technological disruption, can provide successful innovation by disrupting the market. Ultimately, the phone addressed the need of communication in a novel way by allowing instant voice communication rather than telegrams or letters. Cell phones on the other hand allowed phone users to communicate on the go without the constraints of a static phone line. This added functionality triggered a morphing of the telecommunication market. The innovation was a consequence of creative engineers that used technological inventions to provide a product with added functionality. Currently, the smartphone era is dominating the cellphone market. The first smartphone was invented and designed in 1992 by IBM with a full touch screen that replaced physical buttons [20]. IBM was the inventor of the first smartphone but failed to generate innovation from it. Apple successfully used the invention of the smartphone concept along with other inventions in order to design an innovative product that disturbed the cell phone market. Engineers need to understand that innovation is dynamic and dependent on a multitude of outside factors that they do not have control over [21]. New innovations can come from old capabilities/technologies that did not have an application until someone introduced it. The touch screen technology that revolutionized the iPhone was not new; however, it revolutionized the way consumers interact with their phones and became a standard in today's smartphones. In fact, touch screens became a dominant design feature in smartphones for

the user interaction function, and current competitors' smartphones need to use it in order to remain competitive. 2.2 Dominant design A dominant design pertains to a technology concept that becomes a de-facto standard in the respective market place [22]. The dominant design model is described in three different phases: fluid, transitional and specific [21]. The fluid phase has companies competing in the market in a rather uncoordinated process. The first phase is followed by the transitional phase, where innovation slows down and a set of dominant design features emerge. Finally, the specific phase takes over, and customer needs shift to price, performance and quality. Figure 2 represents three hypothetical companies that each introduce a new product. In the early stages, the products compete against each other in order to obtain the consumers’ approval and the leading product becomes the dominant design as it provides the most accepted features by the consumers (product 2.1). Subsequent product iterations from the remaining companies will typically incorporate the dominant design features in order to remain in competition and provide acceptable products to the consumer.

Figure 2: The influence of a dominant design feature on a

market Dominant designs are crucial as they set a standard for future development. From the QWERTY keyboard standard to the use of touch screens in smartphones, dominant design features set trends and boundaries to future design process. Disruptive innovation takes place when those designs are challenged, rethought and improved, whereas building upon dominant design features would only provide incremental innovation with minor differences. Looking at the hard disk drive market, the dominant design features a rotating rigid platter on a motor-driven spindle. This constitutes the core design for any hard disk drive that is available on the market. Companies provide incremental innovations during the specific phase by increasing the hard drive capacity (rigid platter) or by increasing the rotation speed (motor) in order to obtain higher read/write speeds. A technological breakthrough that is being observed in the hard disk drive market has disrupted the current features of the dominant design by introducing Solid State Drives (SSD). As shown in Figure 3, the main observed difference is that the new


SSDs have no moveable parts thus dramatically lowering the risk of corrupted data and damage due to physical shock. Additional benefits for the consumer are lower access time, latency and noise. From a manufacturing perspective, the number of parts required in a solid state drive is dramatically reduced thus lowering the manufacturing complexity

Figure 3: Disassembled hard drive and solid state drive

Engineers can leverage current or past technological inventions in order to disrupt a given market by challenging the current dominant design features. Those technological breakpoints tend to reshuffle the market by providing an alternative design solution that would address current issues identified by consumers. One dynamic aspect of innovation arises from consumer discontent and how well the problem has been resolved/improved upon. In Figure 4 the dynamics of three hypothetical companies in a given market are shown. Company 2 is the current leader and their design is the dominant one. Company 3 failed with their new product and decided to exit the market rather than incorporate the dominant design features into their next product. Company 1 on the other hand identified a potential to incorporate new technology in their product that from their perspective would disrupt the current dominant design features from Company 2. Once launched, the third iteration of products available in the market provides an opportunity for the consumer to decide if the dominant design features remain with Company 2 or if Company 3 successfully disrupts the market by defining a new dominant design feature. In Figure 7, Company 1 successfully challenged the previous dominant design feature and now their product feature has become the dominant one. In order to remain competitive, Company 2 then needs to incorporate the dominant design features into their 4th product iteration (product 2.4). Identifying and resolving the various shortcomings of a given product is not a trivial task. When Apple released their iPhone 4, design engineers overlooked a serious flaw in their antenna design (the "antenna gate" [23]), which lowered the performance of one of its main functions: making phone calls. This however did not affect their sales and today, the iPhone is still one of the most successful phones since its initial introduction in the cell phone market [24].

Figure 4: The dynamics of dominant design features

Successful innovative companies seem to understand both the technical as well as the management side of innovation. The following section describes how management perceives innovation. 2.3 Management's perspective on innovation The factor that best distinguishes new product success from failure is a superior product in the eyes of the consumer [25-27]. Furthermore, product superiority is linked to an understanding of consumer needs [28]. Consequently, market information is a key component to healthy innovation because of the strong link between market information processing and new product success [29-30]. Market information is thought of as the new product development triathlon where the events are gathering, sharing, and using the market information [31]. Not only must one successfully complete all three events, but it is often the last event that separates the winners from the rest of the competition. As stated in [32], "Innovation for many businesses in the 21st century is not an issue, it is the only issue." Recent research throughout the management field investigates the impact innovation has on a given company [33-37]. From a corporation's perspective, the ability to understand innovation benefits the company in better managing their R&D funding by selecting projects that would generate higher, more reliable returns on innovation. Evaluating the different types of innovation inevitably leads to new views of R&D's relationship to corporate strategy. The developed innovation key performance indicators (KPI) in [36] provide a diagnostic tool for the company's innovation capabilities. Based on their immediate needs, the corporate strategy can adjust its R&D spending accordingly and promote healthy innovation.


Companies can balance "high risk - high reward" innovative projects with incremental ones that have a lower risk. In [37], the authors present an innovation radar based on 12 dimensions of innovation. Figure 5 illustrates the dimensions which are anchored in four categories: the What, Where, Who and How of its business system. Companies can monitor their current innovation strategy as well as identify opportunities and prioritize which dimension to focus their efforts. Business innovation is systematic and success requires careful consideration of all aspects of business. For instance, a great product will fail if the company has an ineffective distribution channel. Similarly, a terrific new technology will fail if it lacks a valuable end user application. Thus, when innovating, a company needs to consider all the dimensions of the innovation radar in order to be successful.

Apple's success can be related to its multi dimensional business approach with respect to the innovation radar. The iPod touch/iPhone/iPad family of products is built on a common platform, the iOS operating system, which provides an elegant solution to the consumer. The customer experience at an Apple store is truly unique compared to other electronics stores. Its presence allows the portability of the customer's entire collection of music, pictures and videos and iTunes allows additional value capture by allowing electronic purchases. In terms of networking, iPods, iPhones and iPads can be connected with Mac and Windows computers, which extends the Apple brand beyond the Mac platform. Many scholars have recognized that new product development is an interdisciplinary process centered in the marketing, R&D, and manufacturing domain [28-38]. However, this research fails to properly define what role engineers play in the business innovation scheme and no specific guidelines are prescribed when integrating their findings with the engineering design community in order to provide consistent, systematic innovation.

The following section presents current research regarding innovation and creativity in the engineering design community. The section also allows the reader to better understand the current shortcomings and the necessity to provide a uniform definition for innovation. 3 CURRENT INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY

RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING Despite increased usage of these terms from 1999 to 2005, as demonstrated in Figure 6, innovation still remains an abstract concept difficult to define.

Figure 6: Papers with the keyword "innovat*" and/or

"creativ*" in the title or abstract [39] Furthermore, it is observed that from 2005 to 2010, the number of engineering publications that involve innovation and/or creativity is decreasing, making it even more imperative to properly define and situate those terms in modern design processes.

This section explores previous engineering research in innovation and creativity in order to better understand innovation and its current shortcomings. 3.1 Innovation in engineering design Previous research explored past innovative products in order to extract a set of engineering-level characteristics [40]. The authors proposed five major characteristics of innovation that identified past innovative products and used them to study the frequency of each exhibited characteristics. Their findings suggest that designers need to focus on innovative user interaction in order to increase the perceived delight in the Kano diagram. Although effective, the results only confirm past research in terms of purchase intentions among consumers. Authors in [41] have found that the predominant concern in their purchase intentions in technologically durable products is the ability to provide a user friendly product rather than making it technically advanced. Furthermore, the research presented in [40] gives us a snapshot of past engineering characteristics of innovations which may create "innovation myopia" and could potentially hinder future innovation. Additional research explores various methodologies that enable innovation in the design process. In [42], user-driven

Figure 5: The business innovation radar [37]


innovation methods are presented. By including the customer early on the development phase, the company, as well as the customer can benefit by providing a better end result. This synergy between end-users and designers is already present in software development where designers invite a select number of "enthusiastic" customers to test upcoming software still in the beta phase to better understand the current flaws. This helped Microsoft greatly prior to their Windows 7 launch. Microsoft decided to provide for free the beta version of Windows 7 to its potential customers so that it would not make the same mistakes it did with Windows Vista [43]. Innovation in design can also be achieved through transformation. Authors in [44] present foundational work for transformation principles. The advantage of such products is multi-functionality beyond the single focus of most products. This research has significant potential with regards to providing innovative products that would disrupt dominant design features, however the authors do not define innovation and its impact on the market. Further research explored creativity metrics in order to measure the innovation impact. Authors in [45] proposed the innovation equation with respect to two central creativity metrics: novelty and quality. The metric scores are then weighted and translated into an innovation score that provides help to engineers in assessing the level of creativity and choosing the most innovative alternative at a conceptual stage. This research emphasizes the impact creativity has on the level of innovation of a product. An issue however arises when quantifying the metrics as they are subject to the persons assigning them. Furthermore, the metrics themselves do not provide guidelines on how to improve the design in terms of innovation and what characteristics make the product innovative. Innovation can be achieved in various ways, and the engineering research community provides various techniques that help achieve innovative products. However, a lack of a consistent definition of innovation can lead to confusion and hamper effective communication. Current research fails to address how these different methodologies impact the innovation level of a product. Most of the research is presented as a "one size fits all" method that would enhance the innovation impact of a product, but the reality is that innovation can be achieved in various ways, and limiting one’s focus to a single method is potentially shortsighted. Engineers need to use their creativity in order to address a current need and select the appropriate method to solve it. 3.2 Creativity in engineering design Successful disruptive innovation is typically associated with a single person - Akio Morita for Sony or Steve Jobs for Apple. More recently, Intel hired musical artist will.i.am as "Director of Creative Innovation" in order to help the company design future technology tools that involve microprocessors [46]. Companies tend to hire people that are gifted creatively in order

to stimulate innovation. In fact, creativity is the number one quality that head hunters look for in top level chief executives [47]. Creativity is the essential ingredient for successful problem solving which leads to invention and also innovative application of the available inventions in order to disrupt the market and technology [48]. From a new product development perspective, creativity is a research topic whose goal is to develop improved techniques and software that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. A report from the National Academy of Sciences [49] argues that the challenge for the 21st century is to "work smarter, not harder". The potential for enhancing human creativity has been a recurring theme for visionary thinkers such as Edward de Bono, whose "lateral thinking" ideas [50] have been adopted by national education commissions and are taught in industry. In professional communities there is growing respect for brainstorming techniques used by product design firms such as IDEO [51]. Over 100 formal idea generation techniques exist in areas such as psychology, business and engineering. Some examples include brainstorming by Osborn [52] and engineering specific methods such as the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) [53-54]. Group techniques include brainstorming, brainwriting, 6-3-5, C-Sketch, and Gallery [52-55-59]. Recent work looked at presenting a novel platform that synthesizes information about computationally generated concepts into an intuitive representation interface for exploration by the designer [60]. The interface supports design innovation at a conceptual stage by augmenting the user’s creativity. Although the platform did not significantly impact the measured creativity in the study, it provides a rich foundation for further assessment of IT-enabled innovation tools that enhance creativity. A number of different metrics have been developed and used in order to evaluate idea generation techniques, including the quantity of ideas, number of good ideas, practicality, novelty and variety [61-64]. However, the metrics tend to be subjective as judging panels are employed in the scoring process. Additionally, many potentially good, creative solutions are left aside due to economical or technological infeasibilities. Those lost opportunities might hurt a company in the future and may be the reason why most of the innovation arises from new companies that are less restricted by their current technology use [21]. It is thus important to provide a uniform definition for innovation and incorporate it in a design process. The following section revisits an engineering design process and presents guidelines meant to better foster creativity and provide more effective support for the designer tasked with developing innovative end products.


4 REVISITING A DESIGN PROCESS This section revisits the early stages in a design process in order to introduce the different factors discussed previously that explicitly address the innovation mindset as described in Figure 7. It starts with the clarification of tasks, where a given set of dominant design features is identified. Then, a solution concept is evaluated by the marketing and engineering departments.

Figure 7: Methodology flow chart These proposed guidelines do not replace a current design process but rather compliment it and guide the gathering, managing and processing of the information necessary to achieve innovative design solutions. These new guidelines are supported by the proposed concept to innovation mapping in Section 4.2.2. 4.1 Clarification of tasks In this phase, information regarding the current state of the market is gathered and compiled. Companies who wish to successfully enter the market need to understand its current state with respect to the dominant design features present, its phases, and their potential shortcomings. 4.1.1 Dominant design phase identification Figure 8 illustrates the three different phases of dominant design feature emergence that can be identified. Each phase is

unique in nature and will provide a different set of guidelines and constraints with respect to the design process. 4.1.1 Dominant design phase identification Figure 8 illustrates the three different phases of dominant design feature emergence that can be identified. Each phase is unique in nature and will provide a different set of guidelines and constraints with respect to the design process.

Figure 8: Different dominant design phases

In a fluid phase, companies compete in the innovation

aspect of a new product. This is where customer requirements have to be understood in order to best satisfy their needs. This is the most appropriate phase for a company to enter a market in order to disrupt it.

In a transitional phase, user needs are better understood with respect to the new product. The dominant design features are starting to emerge. The company can decide on one of two options:

1. Disruptive innovation if the company feels like their solution provides a better solution than the emerging dominant design feature, or

2. Incremental innovation if the company prefers to remain competitive without the higher risk and cost associated with disruptive innovation.

In a specific phase, the market is stabilized and the dominant design features are widely accepted, influencing the design of competing firms. The company can again decide on one of two options:

1. Incremental innovation is the preferred approach in order to compete in the market by developing products that are inspired by the dominant design features but provide better performance, quality, and/or a lower price, or


2. Disruptive innovation if the specific phase led to market stabilization. Successful disruptive innovation would lead to a new fluid phase.

4.1.2 Identify current dominant design features The identification of a set of dominant design features in the current leading product as well as its shortcomings is critical to a successful product that will be superior to the competition in the eyes of the consumer. Functional models provide a form-independent blueprint of the product that engineers can use in order to generate new concepts. Figure 10 represents a hypothetical functional model for which a set of functions have been identified from the leading product.

Figure 9: Hypothetical functional model

The identified functions are then related to the dominant design features exhibited in the market. The set of dominant design features can influence a functional model in various ways as they allow engineers to focus on the functions that would have the biggest innovation impact. Figure 10 illustrates various scenarios of the set of dominant design features impact on the hypothetical functional model presented in Figure 9.

Figure 10: Set of dominant design features impact on a

hypothetical functional model The dominant design features can impact a single function, a set of functions, or the overall functional model. Understanding the impact of the dominant design features on the functional model can help engineers determine which method to support design for innovation can be applied (Section 3.1). Also, by addressing the consumers’ requirements shortcomings identified by the marketing department, engineers can focus on the highlighted functions in order to either disrupt the set of dominant design features or provide an incremental improvement. The information gathered by the marketing department together with the identified mapping of the dominant design features

onto the generated functional model provides constraints to the design process. Engineers begin the conceptual design phase by generating new concepts in order to provide incremental or disruptive innovation. 4.2 Conceptual stage In the previous step, the dominant design phase has been identified and depending on which phase is active, the appropriate corporate goals and design constraints have been determined. In this section, we discuss how the processed qualitative information can be used to develop innovative products that best satisfy consumer needs. To best achieve this, engineers need to explore existing design repositories or generate new solutions in order to provide innovative concepts that are not currently present in a design repository and that could be reused in future product developments. 4.2.1 Concept generation As technology becomes more diverse, advanced, and global, designers tend to lack sufficient resources and expertise to make effective, informed creative leaps that lead to innovative concepts. An alternative to current concept generation techniques is presented in [60]. A novel platform synthesizes information about automatically generated concepts from the functional structure concept developed by Pahl and Beitz [54] into an intuitive user interface for exploration.

Figure 11: Visualize IT approach flow chart

Figure 11 presents the flowchart of the user interface describing each step necessary for concept exploration. Once the engineer selects a functional model for the given project, concepts are generated automatically replacing functions with compatible components. The automated aspect of concept generation requires the use of design repositories that contain component information compatible with various functions. Design repositories allow the storage and retrieval of design knowledge. They are typically used to enhance the designer’s creativity by allowing them to rely on a myriad of solutions instead of their own knowledge [65]. If well populated, design


repositories have the potential to steer the designer into an adequate set of concepts that would correspond to the identified needs or emphasize a function that still has no component able to fully satisfy or improve upon. Figure 12 represents an automatically generated concept which has a function that was not replaced with a compatible component by the design repository. Engineers would then need to apply creative problem solving in order to provide a solution to the function. The solution generation phase should allow designers to be as creative as they can in their problem solving exercise using the creativity enhancing tools described in Section 3.2. Designers can also use patent search engines in order to find a component that would satisfy the required function. It is important to not discard the generated feasible solutions as they can be used for future concepts once available in the design repository.

Figure 12: A generated hypothetical concept with a missing

component Once the concepts have been generated, engineers can proceed to the concept evaluation stage in order to identify a set of feasible concepts. 4.2.2 Concept Evaluation The concept evaluation stage is critical to monitor the desired

innovative impact a selected product will have on the market. Therefore, we propose three different innovation impacts that the new concepts can have. Figure 13 illustrates the different impacts with corresponding examples. The first type of impact is vertical. In this case, a concept will not add any additional functionality by combining two or more functions. It will rather allow improved performance of a given function. An example would be to select a better processor for a smartphone in order to increase the responsive of the operating system. Vertical impact is most appropriate when a company is

looking at incremental innovation as the function related to the dominant design feature is improved upon.

The second type of impact is horizontal. In this case, the generated concept merges different functions into one without improving their performance. An example would be the iPhone as it incorporates various functions such as call making, music player or video playback. Horizontal impact has the potential to provide really new

innovation by impacting a saturated market and reconfiguring it.

Depending on the component or set of components that will fulfill the dominant design feature, it can have a vertical, horizontal or hybrid impact on the innovativeness of the product. Figure 14 illustrates this impact with the proposed qualitative dimension based on the proposed innovation mapping. The hypothetical generated concept from Figure 12 is revisited. The functions that influence the dominant design features have been identified and addressed by the engineering team at the concept generation stage and a set of concepts has

Figure 13: Three different types of innovation impact


been chosen for further evaluation. The hypothetical concepts can thus provide: Incremental innovation: Concepts that have a vertical

impact are appropriate when a company looks at providing a product that builds upon a set of dominant design features in order to increase the performance, quality, or reduce price.

Really new innovation: Concepts that have a horizontal impact are appropriate when looking at innovation that disrupts the market.

Radical innovation: Concepts that have a hybrid impact are appropriate when looking at radical innovation that would disrupt both the technology and market.

Figure 14: Concept to innovation mapping

When clustering the concepts, engineers can identify potential candidates that would satisfy a company's immediate product need as well as identify potential concepts that can be used in future product development. At this stage engineers can help the company in two different ways. First, it can immediately provide an innovative product with respect to current corporate goals. Second, it can also help the company in seeing new possibilities in future business strategies that promote successful and consistent innovation, which is something business strategist would profit from [66]. 4.2.3 The conceptual stage impact on corporate goals The proposed concept innovation impact relies on two dimensions: functions that address a consumer need, and the performance of the addressed functions. Although useful with respect to engineering innovation, those dimensions are insufficient when looking at the overall business innovation strategy of a company. Figure 15 revisits the business innovation radar presented earlier, but with an update based on our engineering innovation framework.

The conceptual stage has the ability to directly impact three business innovation dimensions from Figure 7: the offerings, platform and solutions. “Offerings” refer to a product or service a company offers. Innovation along this dimension requires the creation of new products that are valued by the consumer. The proposed new perspective on the early design stages has the ability to facilitate innovative products by selecting the product that best addresses the current flaws of the dominant design features.

Figure 15: Engineering innovation on the business

innovation radar The “Platform” is a set of common components, assembly method or technology that serves as a building block for a variety of products. Product family and platform design is an ongoing topic of research in the design community that can both drive and leverage engineering innovation. Once an innovative product has established itself in the market, the dominant design features can be used to create derivative products, similar to Apple's iPad product launch. “Solutions” provides integrated and customized offerings to solve end-to-end customer problems. Using appropriate design for innovation methodologies developed by the design community, engineers can generate solutions that enhance the innovation impact of a product. By identifying concepts that have a horizontal, or even hybrid innovation impact at the concept evaluation stage, engineers can present concepts that would enhance this business innovation dimension. Although marketing is not discussed explicitly as it is outside of the scope of this paper, the proposed framework regarding engineering innovation together with marketing can have a greater impact on the business innovation radar. As shown in Figure 15, in addition to improving the three previous dimensions directly, the resulting successful product can impact


the customer, and brand dimension indirectly through marketing. One example would be the iPhone ads that present to the public the unique experience when using their product, and highlights the new dominant design feature. The company is then perceived as innovative in the eyes of the consumer. When selecting a concept, many factors need to be taken into account and are generally beyond the three business innovation dimensions an engineer has influence on. Certain concepts can be more promising than others in terms of performance or functionality, but if the current market is not ready for it or the technology required is still at its early stage, there is a higher risk of failure. However, it is important for the company to not discard potentially good concepts that do not satisfy the immediate needs of the company. Instead, based on the presented innovation impact a concept might have, the company can think of a long term plan to reposition themselves in the future in order to remain innovative. When a new technology is identified at the conceptual stage that would considerably improve upon a current set of dominant design features, the company can prepare itself by decreasing their dependency on current technology as they prepare themselves to embrace the new one. This is a problem that most of the well-established companies fail to perform when a wave of technological innovation takes place. Companies such as Kodak failed to not only predict a technological change but also reacted too late in their readaptation. Upon picking the desired concepts, the design firm should validate that the solution has a good potential for success. Focus groups can be used in order to determine if the range of performance is acceptable when providing an incrementally innovative product. If the company looks at disruptive innovations, it should be verified that the potential consumers feel comfortable using the product. 5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK Most design practices of current companies fall short in providing consistent and successful innovation. That is why certain companies need to outsource their design activities to companies like IDEO or Frog Design in order to provide an innovative product. This paper proposes a new set of guidelines in the task clarification stage that are motivated by challenging or developing a set of dominant design features. These guidelines help define and realize immediate and long term corporate design goals. A concept to innovation mapping has also been proposed. This would add an additional dimension into an engineering design process allowing the designer constantly to be aware of the type as well as the level of innovation the product will have once released into the market. The three different innovation impact categories allow engineers to better communicate the strengths of the generated concepts in terms of overall R&D funding management as well as satisfying immediate corporate goals. Innovation can be achieved in various ways, and at different

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