Product Profiles: Modelling customer benefits as a foundation to bring inventions to innovations

According to recent studies, early and clearly defined customer's demands and provider's demands are necessary elements for the future success of a product. Product profiles within the scope of ASD Agile Systems Design describe these demands. As product characterizations in the early development phases, product profiles do not anticipate the technical realization of the product, but rather model customer's benefits and provider's benefits as use cases, requirements and boundary conditions and thus include value-added product attributes. By this, product profiles represent the interdisciplinary design objective and form the core of the related generation of business models. However, there is a lack of a suitable methodology to systematize the generation of product profiles. There are no approaches that allow the consideration of corresponding reference products in the context of PGE Product Generation Engineering when generating product profiles. Starting with a retrospective study, more than 100 product profiles and their development in three Live-Labs with industrial participation as well as three industrial innovation projects are analyzed. Based on this a definition of product profiles is derived and a product profile scheme to model profiles is introduced. Furthermore, the different modules as elements of product profiles are explained. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.