Product-process design and continuing innovation

Continuing innovation in industrial enterprises means to promote a frequent re-design of offered products as well as of the production processes required. The consequent design efforts appear to be a hard task even to large enterprises, because both the product concept and the process organization are involved. A design approach based on the idea of gradually modifying the product and the related production process is mandatory, as well as the idea of a design process starting from simple concepts of both product and process, and going towards descriptions of greater and greater details for both of them. This is the design approach proposed here and stated in terms of a multi-resolutional design process, where each design stage is at obtaining a more and more accurate description of the new objects to be developed. This multi-step multi-resolution decisional process is denoted here as "innovation loop". The paper will introduce a conceptual model of this incremental-design process and will emphasize its applicability. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.