Innovative products are the key to success for all kinds of companies in a highly competitive global market. This especially applies to the automobile industry. Therefore it is essential in the product development process to get objective information about the degree of innovation and the success potential of both product ideas and products. An evaluation method which is able to deliver numerical values for these two abstract items could be extremely helpful to make the right decisions when selecting product ideas or solutions, especially in the early phases of the development process. This paper describes a new evaluation method with the objective to determine quantitatively the success potential (in terms of market penetration) and the degree of innovation of technical ideas and products, mainly from the technical point of view. The following definition was chosen as a basis for the new evaluation method: An innovation is the successfid realisation of a novelty, a creative idea or an invention with enhanced customer and manufacturer benefit. Thus, it is the task of the method to 'measure' the grade of novelty as well as the customer and manufacturer benefit. The basic idea to realize this was to use a modified and expanded QFD method (Quality Function Deployment). In order to measure the manufacturer benefit, business economics provide many approaches and operating figures which, therefore, are not taken into consideration in this paper. In any case, such information is often not available at the early stage of the development process. Thus, the new method focuses on the technical point of view. The method was evaluated in five pilot projects of well-known companies from different industries. The evaluation shows that the method can be used for evaluating both individual elements of a product development process and entire technical systems and that it makes 'innovation' measurable.
Bewertung des Innovationsgrades von Produktideen und Produkten
Evaluating the degree of innovation of product ideas and products
2007
14 Seiten, 6 Bilder, 1 Tabelle, 5 Quellen
Conference paper
German
Bewertung des Innovationsgrades von Produktideen und Produkten
Automotive engineering | 2007
|Generieren neuer Produktideen Werkzeuge und Methoden eines modernen Innovationsmanagements
British Library Online Contents | 2007
Online Contents | 1995