Predicting the competitive advantage of design projects to dynamically support decisions in product development

Many product development initiatives are planned on the basis of the supposed capability to generate customer satisfaction. However, market and technology conditions can undergo several transformations during the execution of product innovation projects and jeopardise the basic assumptions taken at the beginning of the design cycle. Among changing factors, the observed alternation of radical and incremental transformations of product architectures is viable to influence the success chances of new products. Such an aspect is taken into account in the decision support tool described in the paper, which can be employed to select the most beneficial alternatives in a set of different product ideas.