Innovative product development process by integrating QFD and TRIZ

QFD (Quality Function Deployment) has been used to reflect the needs of customers in products, while TRIZ (a Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) was developed to assist engineers in finding innovative solutions to technical problems in product development processes. However, no method has been proposed to integrate QFD with TRIZ effectively. This report describes a new method, named the Innovative Product Development Process (IPDP), which systematically integrates QFD with TRIZ and enables the effective and systematic creation of technical innovation for new products. In IPDP, the target products' functions and mechanisms are deployed in parallel into hierarchical structures, and the mechanism that most requires technical innovation is specified from an analysis of customers' needs by calculating a mechanism weight. Then, the technical problems to be solved are defined by considering the relationship between the specified mechanism and corresponding functions or quality characteristics, and technical innovation is executed by applying TRIZ. The effectiveness of IPDP was confirmed by applying it to the technical innovation of a washing machine.