It is not easy to design an innovative product that delights customers. Current engineering design methods provide help in designing a good product, but the designer lacks tools that help him or her create a truly innovative, successful product. In this study, we analyzed 95 innovative, award-winning products against their competition to identify what made those products stand out from the competition. We focused on finding engineering-level characteristics that made the products successful. We developed a set of conditionally repeatable innovation categories that are used in the analysis. We found that the most innovative products were innovative in multiple categories. Overall, a vast majority (greater than 70%) of the award-winning products exhibited enhanced user interactions, with a similar percentage displaying enhanced environmental interactions, compared with approximately one-third of products offering an additional function and approximately half displaying innovative architectures. We conclude that breakthrough or innovative products are becoming increasingly centered on user interactions and that engineers need better methods to design these products.

Volume Subject Area:
21st International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology
Topics:
Architecture, Design, Engineering design, Engineers, Innovation, Mechanical products
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