An Investigation of Different Kinds of Innovation in Product Design and the Station Point of Industrial Design in Innovation Process

     This paper is a study in different kinds of innovations in the product-design field and the way of categorization of them and station point of industrial design in this process. The research process comprised the following five steps: 1. Defining the research problem and establishing its methodology; 2.Selecting and describing samples; 3. Analyzing data and shaping hypotheses; 4. Testing the categorization and refining it; 5. Final testing and enfolding results with existing literature. The first step of the research project attempted to determine how to better demonstrate the contribution, design makes to product innovation. In order to answer this, a phenomenological approach was used, i.e. observing product innovation as a phenomenon. From this approach, three possible levers of a design-driven innovation process emerged: form, mode of use, and technology. This overall research process fits with the humanities tradition. This process first saw the gathering of “evidence produced by research” and then the gathering of “the judgments of other scholars” on the emerging research issues. On these “primary” and “secondary” sources of information, a logical argument was conducted by adding personal judgments in order to arrive at the final formulation of results. A detailed description of each step in the research process follows. During the third step of this research, which was devoted to shaping hypotheses, one issue that emerged was whether to consider design-driven innovation a process. Discussion on the first ten examples had clearly shown the need to distinguish between the results obtained by the designer and the tools he or she used to reach it. Therefore, the research group decided to assume the following definition of innovation, which is now widely accepted and underlines its procedural nature: “innovation equals creativity plus a successful implementation processing”. Through our phenomenological analysis, four possible results were distinguished: •Aesthetic Innovation •Innovation of Use •Meaning Innovation •Typological Innovation. In the dialectics between function,” the use the object is intended for,” and form” the external configuration of an object resulting from shape, proportion and color,” dialectics that have long characterized the history of industrial design, aesthetic innovation concerns form while innovation of use concerns the function. Conversely, no such clear-cut distinction between meaning innovation and typological innovation can be drawn. The levers and results are systematized here into an innovation pyramid, which helps to clarify both their similarities and their differences. Is such a categorization for product innovation, as set forth here, really true to life? And, by proposing it, are we not likely to constrain the results of creative activity into too rigid a model? As such, identifying the three levers and the four results for the design-driven innovation process mandates forgoing certain differences and obliging certain resemblances. Consequently an innovation pyramid has introduced which presents four different kind of design- driven innovations. This pyramid is the final result of our research process involving the three key disciplinary areas related to new product development: management, engineering and design. Nevertheless, the proposed categorization has enabled the author of this article to clearly explain the design-driven innovation phenomenon to students.