Innovation happens only when the conditions are right; it can't be forced. Clearly, innovation can occur randomly when someone creative comes up with a new solution. This type of innovation is hard to predict and impossible to plan. If it is going to happen inside a corporate environment it is likely to be incubated in a Research and Development group tasked with being creative or by allowing independent time for employees to think about solutions to problems that interest them. Product development projects can't have innovation as a scheduled phase or task in the plan. Projects that are largely product improvement efforts are typically highly constrained and may offer very little opportunity for innovative ideas to germinate. Broader New Product Development (NPD) projects tends to offer greater opportunities for innovative ideas to become part of the product.
Companies that have traditionally been engaged in incremental product improvement may struggle when making the transition to developing completely new products. It is unlikely that breakthroughs in increased performance, improved user experiences, and lower costs are achievable through the use of closed-form equations and comparative models that may be in prevalent use where the product development is incremental. A different development approach is needed.
Image from Cyon Research
This is often because the development of new products should begin with a strong focus on developing concepts that best meet the product's requirements (or maximizes the potential for the product to be successful in the market). The methods for conducting conceptual engineering are not typically well understood in environments where the product development is largely evolutionary.
Conceptual Engineering is not just the name of the early phases of a development project – the approach, tools, and skills required for conceptual engineering are different than what is needed for detail design and for supporting product improvement efforts. I have found that small teams, consisting of members with broad domain expertise, working collaboratively, are able to cycle through concepts very rapidly.
This focused attention at the highest-level system allows for evaluation of the performance very efficiently. Typically this is done virtually through modeling and simulation. The systems approach minimizes risk as the highest-level performance attributes are captured first and subsystem- and (ultimately) component-level requirements are cascaded down. Because, often, system models can be build rapidly, it becomes possible to to develop and evaluate multiple concepts and discard concepts that will likely fail to meet the requirements. These methods minimize the risk and delivers results faster.
Contrast this top-down approach with a bottom-up approach that relies on components to be assembled into subsystems and those subsystems to then be integrated before being able to assess the performance at the system level. The bottom-up approach is time consuming and offers little opportunity to ensure that system performance requirements can be met. Furthermore, the resultant model is often very sensitive to the architecture captured and becomes very brittle when architectural or topological changes (and sometimes even parametric changes) are attempted. Development teams that are utilizing a bottom-up approach often find themselves stuck with few options and must try to squeeze as much performance as is possible from what they have been able to produce. This is why there are so many simulation and optimization packages that are tightly coupled with CAD software.
Teams that are using a systems approach in their conceptual development phase are typically able to deliver innovative solutions as a result of the increased freedom to investigate many more concept solutions. But it is hard! The elements that I have found that are essential to doing this are these:
- To develop new products the use of modeling and simulation techniques must be used
- Evaluating the system-level performance against requirements early, i.e. before any detail design activities begins, maximizes the opportunity for a product to be successful
- There must be a commitment to compose multiple, competing concepts and a willingness to abandon ideas (concepts) that show little potential to meet requirements
Don’t just simulate early (using simulation based on detailed CAD geometry) but really drive the design by allowing teams to work together generating concepts with advanced methods. Many organizations find this very challenging; I see it as an opportunity for both the companies developing new products and systems and the Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) tools vendors. Let's go innovate!