Innovative Design Methods in the Food Processing Industry

The food processing industry has been an innovation intensive domain for a long time. However, when analyzing the nature of the industrial organization of this industry we surprisingly noticed that there was an important gap between R&D and marketing activities, on one side and industrial developments activities on the other side particularly in the SMEs. We believe that the latest developments in engineering design research may bring some benefits to the food processing industry. TRIZ and C-K are two very different approaches that have already been successfully used in the food industry. In this paper we present an attempt to combine the two methods in order to provide a methodological framework that allows a more efficient use of the two methods. We propose a theoretical reflection on the use of these two very different approaches and propose an original interpretation of TRIZ within the paradigm of the C-K theory.