Methods and tools to support New Product Development tasks

During the last decades a multitude of methods has been developed with the aim of supporting New Product Development tasks. Most of these approaches focus on the final steps of the design process aimed at improving technical solutions and detail aspects. However, a growing interest is also paid towards early phases that result crucial in determining the successful achievement of innovation initiatives. The first phase of design process, generally known as Product Planning, allows analysing the reference market and planning a differentiation strategy capable to fulfill customer needs. New product and service ideas identified in this phase will be the driver for the following design tasks. Despite its strategic role, a deep analysis of the literature shows that methods and tools developed to support such phase failed in pursuing this objective, since they only partially meet companies’ needs. Starting from the evidences of this survey, the research activity performed in this doctorate was aimed at defining a method and a set of tools to effectively support Product Planning. The Thesis describes the developed approach and its implementation in various industrial fields. The methodology is a systematic approach that supports all the activities of Product Planning, from information gathering up to the selection of a new product idea that will be developed in the following design phases. Two exemplary applications are described in order to clarify the application of the whole approach and four further tests have been carried out with the aim of assessing one of the original tool developed to support the idea generation task. All these experiments allow understanding the effectiveness of developed method and tools in different industrial sectors. The contents are organized in 7 main Sections. Chapter 1 introduces the scientific context of the Thesis and describes the pursued methodological objectives. In Chapter 2 a critical review of literature tools and methods to support Product Planning and an analysis of companies’ demands, is presented. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the description of the methodological proposal, by providing for each step of Product Planning the suitable (original and existing) tools to carry out that activity. Chapter 4 illustrates the application of the method to two case studies. Chapter 5 describes the experiments carried out in order to test an original tool developed to support the idea generation phase. In Chapter 6 discussions are presented about the effectiveness of original method and tools, the achievement of the methodological objective and possible future research activities that can be developed starting from the results obtained by this research. Eventually in Chapter 7 the conclusions are presented.