Analysing product development working practices for enhancing innovation through collaboration and simulation

Abstract

The importance of innovation for success in the 21st century economy is evident from the numerous articles on innovation that begin with the statement “companies must innovate or they will die”. It is not sufficient anymore for companies to compete on the basis of cost or time-to-market – if innovation is not part of the company culture, it is very difficult to survive in today’s fast-paced and competitive market. Furthermore, as stated by[ Adams et al. 2006], companies seeking to be innovative should establish formal processes for innovating and make use of tools that facilitate innovative endeavours. The importance of tools as an input to the innovation process is also highlighted by [Cooper et al. 2004]. These tools fall under various categories such as tools for promoting creativity and tools for quality control [Adams et al. 2006]. This research argues that for the innovation process to be successful, two activities together with their supporting tools are required – stakeholder collaboration and artefact simulation. Stakeholder collaboration here refers to collaboration between product development stakeholders, such as designers, customers and manufacturing engineers, required to develop innovative products. Artefact simulation refers to simulation of both the product being developed as well as the manufacturing processes and systems used to develop the product. Both activities fall within what is termed in this research as the Innovation Cloud. Within this cloud is the product development process that involves multiple experts (e.g. designers, production managers) coming from different areas and who need to collaborate together to develop innovative products and manufacturing systems [Adams et al. 2006], [SDRC 2000]. The innovation process is preferably assisted by means of Innovation Management Techniques (IMTs), which are a range of techniques that help companies adapt to different circumstances and market needs in a systematic way [Phaal et al. 2006]. However, collaboration and IMTs by themselves are not sufficient. One of the main stumbling blocks when it comes to the implementation of innovative ideas is the justification of new capital expenses in the short-term and the prediction of long-term profits and other performance metrics such as assembly time, environmental impacts, etc. Thus, artefact simulation is required to predict the consequences of the innovative ideas generated and compare their feasibility from a performance metric perspective [Westkämper 2007]. In view of these arguments, the ultimate goal of this research project is to develop a framework through which product development stakeholders are able to enhance innovation in the product and its manufacturing process, by the use of innovation tools as well as collaboration and simulation tools. In this paper, the focus is on the problem analysis phase of the research project, more specifically on the data collection carried out at local manufacturing companies and on the generation of as-is and to-be models (Figure 1).