Addressing the innovation challenge: insights and strategies

Innovating is challenging: creative and appealing ideas have to become marketable products. In this competitive context designers'' role is becoming more and more fundamental and complex. Since their main task is to find innovative solutions of technical problems and optimize them within the requirements set by marketing experts and organization business models, it is mandatory to reduce as much as possible the time spent for this optimization process in order to shorten the new product time to market."Things get worst" for designers when this optimization process has to deal with continuous changes: as the technology evolves existing customers develop new needs, but also this technology may appeal to new kinds of customers, with new kinds of needs. That is how a product evolves and why organizations have to innovate. This book discusses the innovation challenge trying to find and propose new streams of research and practical strategies, deliberately omitting business and economics aspects but putting all the efforts on discussing about the design process.