Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
economic actor proposing a new product on the market is able to cover his costs by
selling a given volume of it at a given price and that, on the side of demand, a
number of economic actors are willing to buy that volume of products at that price,
and still gain some utility out of it (Cantamessa et al.
2012
).
Indeed, the so-called Fuzzy Front End of New Product Development, which
concerns the stages spanning from the opportunity identification to the concept
definition, is characterized by high market and technological uncertainties. While
the latter have been traditionally addressed by a multitude of studies both by
academia and industry, just recently engineering design research has approached
the proposition of methods and tools suitable to systematically support needs
identification and concept ideation, so as to reduce market uncertainties. Still, the
lack of structured means for supporting decision making within the front end of
innovation (Appio et al.
2011
) determines a huge waste of resources for developing
Borgianni et al.
2013
).
In this context, the product user has become the focus of designers' attention, as
witnessed by the success of research topics such as “co-design” and “user-centered
design”. This is certainly a necessary, but not sufficient step ahead towards the
definition of design methods and tools suitable to guide the ideation of new
products likely to be adopted, or in brief towards a design methodology for
innovation. In fact, several stakeholders can play a significant role on the adoption
process of a new product. As described in detail in the next chapter, it is more and
more necessary to identify these mutual influences so as to properly recognize
beforehand the motives and the values behind the success of a new product.
All in all, it means that design has to explicitly embrace all the activities related
to the identification of the needs and the demands that people have or can be
induced to have, as well as the study of the mechanisms behind the purchase and
the adoption decision. Beyond the seminal tools and methods already available to
support these activities, mostly derived from industrial practice, it is time to
investigate with more consistent scientific means what works, what is appropriate,
what produces real value, in turn what reliably brings to innovation.
In this perspective, this paper presents a model, built as an extension of the
situated Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) framework (Gero and Kannengiesser
stages of a New Product Development activity, or in a Pre-Design activity
according to the terminology of this collection of papers. The model aims at
being a reference to recognize and study best practices in industry, to identify
strengths and weaknesses of a design methodology for what concerns its support to
conceptual design, and to codify individual and collective thinking paths within
innovation tasks.
The paper is structured as follows: the next section analyses with further details
the motivation of this study, as well its related literature. The third section describes
the original situated FBS framework, highlighting the reasons to use it as a
reference, as well as what needs to be integrated for the purpose of this work.
Then the authors' proposal for extending the FBS model is presented, with a double
Search WWH ::
Custom Search