Setting the stage for developing innovative product concepts: people and climate

Abstract

When developing a successor of an existing product, it is relatively easy to involve consumers at the early stages of the process—one could, for example, observe them using the current products, and discuss with them what could be improved. However, when creating novel products from ‘scratch’, consumers might find it difficult to articulate future needs, to appreciate the potential and limitations of new technologies, or think about possible applications. So, consumer co-creation in the early creative phase does not seem to be feasible. Other approaches to include the consumer perspective need to be considered. Furthermore, product innovation is increasingly about how to create an appealing and alluring experience, bringing further challenges to the innovation process. A promising approach seems to be bringing together domain experts from different backgrounds, creating a setting in which barriers between disciplines can disappear, and adopting a user-centric, rapid iterative investigation, ideation, prototyping and development process.

Keywords:

• Product development
• User centred development
• Ideation
• Affective engineering

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank colleagues at Philips Research who contributed to the various projects presented in this paper, in particular Elmo Diederiks and the other members of the Ambient-Intelligent Lighting team, Janneke Verhaegh and Willem Fontijn and other members of the Interactive (ESP) Toys team, and Bernt Meerbeek and Peter Bingley and the other members of the iCat-Brains team. Furthermore, the author would like to thank Tom Childs, Vassilis Agouridas, and James Longstaff from the University of Leeds, for sparkling discussions on incremental versus disruptive processes—step- or otherwise—and the other partners in the ENGAGE project, for the affective tools. ENGAGE is a Coordination Action co-financed by the European Community under the IST Priority of the VI Framework Programme (Project No. 510998). More information about the ENGAGE project can be found on the website: http://www.engage-design.org/

Notes

^†More details can be found on the iCat website: www.research.philips.com/robotics