A needs analysis approach to product innovation driven by design

Effective acquisition of customer needs is critical to product innovation, and customer needs can be classified into three types according to different difficulty levels of capturing, they are customer needs that can be got directly, the predictable customer needs, and the unpredictable customer needs. In the existing research achievements, voice of customers and in-depth experience of customers are applied to acquire needs from customers directly, additionally, the needs evolution laws and customer scenario analysis provide guidance for forecasting needs, but for the unpredictable customer needs, it lacks instructive method to follow. The study proposes an approach of analyzing unpredictable needs by introducing the core idea of design-driven innovation, which includes a serious of steps, classification of super-system resources, basic feature extraction process of super-system resources, four models of creating needs for product innovation. This approach changes a customer-centered needs analysis way into a way of needs generation triggered by resources variation in super system, decreases obstacles of innovation caused by the condition that customers don't know what they want in the future. Finally, office scanner was taken for example, and the generation of new needs for other types of scanners verifies the feasibility and validity of this approach. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.