Redesign for product innovation

In today's market, most companies redesign to create new products. Redesign improves product quality and reduces cycle time. However, most techniques limit innovation. They modify a single reference product, which closely matches user needs, and only introduce new products when major conflicts exist between user needs and existing products. This study introduces a new redesign for product innovation approach. The approach combines two or more distinct reference designs into a single new product. The process creates design conflicts. The induced conflicts stimulate innovation. At the same time, the approach uses structured redesign techniques and structured design principles to overcome the conflicts, which improves solution quality and reduces cycle time. The study also presents a case study to demonstrate the approach. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.