Documentation and evaluation in early stages of the product development process.

For developing innovative products for new markets in the context of high demanding technology development projects, often different creative methods are used by development teams. In this way, the teams are able to create a high number of concept ideas within a short period of time. Due to the exchange of team members, often practiced in development projects, it is very difficult to keep an overview of which ideas are already known and which are perfectly new. In the context of different development projects at the Institute of Product Development at the Technische Universität München these problems were detected and important factors for innovative product development processes were identified. For supporting the documentation during the development processes, a form for the improved, more comprehensible documentation of results from creative sessions has been developed. In a second step, the essential structure of this form has been modelled in a data base, which permits archiving concepts and a computer aided evaluation. The main problem is, if the ideas are not documented in a practical manner, that they are lost.     «

For developing innovative products for new markets in the context of high demanding technology development projects, often different creative methods are used by development teams. In this way, the teams are able to create a high number of concept ideas within a short period of time. Due to the exchange of team members, often practiced in development projects, it is very difficult to keep an overview of which ideas are already known and which are perfectly new. In the context of different develo...     »