A Proposal to Systematic Innovation: Engineering and Financing Design

The worldwide market of nowadays is volatile and increasingly calls for tangible and nontangi-ble customized products. This is a remarkable challenge to companies, which must implement processes for generating new ideas that could fulfil the consumer´s aspirations, as well as more efficient internal processes. The need of continuous production of new ideas implies a fast decision-making process to select the ideas that deserve to be explored. Such fast decision-making should take place in the conceptual design phase, and should consider both engineering and economic matters. TRIZ, “lateral thinking”, “thinking out of the box” or “case-based reasoning” are useful to find design solutions, but they lack the tools that are required to evaluate the goodness of those new designs. However, the new designs should be technically and economically sound, so that the idea makes the innovation come true. This paper presents a decision-making framework based on Axiomatic Design (AD). Specifically, the AD’s hierarchical decomposition and mapping between design domains will be used to systematically examine the engineering and the economic feasibility of innovative ideas.