Product And Process Design And Delivery: Invention Through To Innovation

Many product/process design courses, including ours, focus heavily on ideas like the stage-gate and quality function deployment as their conceptual foundation. It is clear that effective realization of innovation depends heavily on creative and rigorous generation and capture into the innovation of many very early and sometimes ill-defined ideas, sometimes referred to as the fuzzy front end. Despite its importance, however, this critical first step receives scant treatment in most product/process design curricula. We suggest that this early, inventive stage merits considerable attention, and believe that tools exist (e.g., TRIZ) to demonstrate how early, ill-defined ideas can be injected quickly and rigorously into the innovation management process. Our presentation will outline approaches to consider invention through to innovation as an important perspective of product/process design and delivery strategies.