Product innovation has been identified as a strategic priority for the majority of
companies, which can direct their innovation factors at a range of objectives, from small
upgrades to existing products, until new-to-the-world offering that can create entirely new
markets. But an investment in a new innovation can make or break a company. Indeed,
successful innovation process requires a wide range of capabilities, from idea generation and
R&D, through portfolio management and product launch. Understanding how an innovation can
deliver value to its stakeholders, both the customers and the firm itself, is then broadly
recognized as a critical challenge for established firms facing product innovation: customer
satisfaction and overall revenue growth are today the most commonly used measures of
innovation success. The strong believe behind this work is that the success and the effectiveness
of a new product idea highly depend on the design phase and in particular on how it is
developed by designers whose expertise is fundamental not only during the detail design phase
but also in the early stages of the innovation process: successful innovation relies on well
developed great ideas but well developed ideas rely on good design. But to get a good design
approach it is then fundamental not only to foster and guide designers' ability, but also
encourage their creativity, as well as furnish systematic procedures to help them render
designing comprehensible and enable the subject to be taught.
Then, what can companies do to improve their ability to take ideas into cash? Four
complementary answers are discussed in this work considering product innovation both as a
process to develop and a project to manage. The first answer provides insight into the allocation of development resources and the scheduling of project milestones, based on an assessment of product characteristics and team capabilities. Two years of an on-going data driven research support this answer. The second one deals with the challenge of preserving, managing and easily retrieving company innovation projects knowledge: a web based project platform is designed to support the work of distributed innovation departments. How deal with the fuzziness of early stages innovation process? Suggestions for structuring a robust ideation process to help firms achieve greater success in their efforts to develop new product, represent the third answer.
Finally, how product innovation can be integrated with design by modification? A model-based frame work is discussed with the intent to furnish a product logic representation to help companies understanding and prioritizing product changes: how can they know what can be changed and what should be reused? A successful approach to change management is required to avoid paying the price of lost opportunity, of delays and disruption associated with improperly introduced, or ill-conceived, design changes. As the overview highlights this work integrates rationale for product innovation from a number of different literature. By considering the results presented in this thesis, development organizations can retrieve feedbacks to get their innovation process more effective. The approaches developed and all the aspects discussed are particularly applicable to market oriented products where the necessity to continuously offer new and appealing products is as important as minimizing investment costs efforts in order to maximize benefits.
