An Innovative Product Development Process for Resolving Fundamental Conflicts

Abstract

The authors advocate combining QFD and TRIZ so that they complement each other into a systematic approach named Innovative Product Development Process (IPDP) to the conceptual design of an innovative product. This paper presents a method, as a bridge to connect QFD and TRIZ, for identifying the technical problems that should be resolved by TRIZ in order to achieve the target quality set by QFD. In the proposed method, it is assumed that negative correlations among the quality characteristics prevent the target quality from being reached, and the causes of the negative correlations are traced down to the fundamental conflicts among subsystems which constitute the product. Then, the criticality of each fundamental conflict is calculated according to the relationships with the quality characteristics and those with the other conflicts captured by DEMATEL. Further, an algorithmic procedure for TRIZ-based innovation to reduce the gap between the quality of the product and its pre-specified target is developed based on the criticality of each fundamental conflict. The proposed method is described using a die-casting machine as an illustrative example, and it is shown that some innovative conceptual design solutions are successfully derived through the proposed approach.