Design for Innovation – a methodology to engineer the innovation diffusion into the development process

In its hyper-inflated usage, innovation simply means ‘‘something new’’, and is applied to any technical novelty. In its true meaning, innovating means designing something that will not only work under a technical point of view, but will also make business sense. ‘‘Design for Innovation’’ means considering that design cannot simply focus on a narrow meaning of ‘‘product use’’, because this could severely limit the diffusion of innovative products. The paper proposes an original model for representing what we call ‘‘beyond-use situations’’ and the influences among the actors involved in the innovation diffusion process. Taking inspiration from social influence network models and from the Multi-issue Actor Strategy Analysis Model (MASAM), the paper presents an operational methodology to assess the influence of different actors on the decision to adopt a new product. In turn, such methodology should support design teams to conceive novel solutions more likely to become factual innovations. The paper also describes a computer-implementable technique, loosely derived from Quality Function Deployment, to practically apply the proposed methodology. An industrial case study from the medical-care sector illustrates its logic and operational steps.