Supporting decision making in design creativity through requirements identification and evaluation

Product innovation, based on the identification and implementation of new solutions, is essential to keep a company competitive. However, the risk of failure of a new solution must be properly weighted during the decision-making in the design activity. This study proposes a method to evaluate a new design solution through the comparison with an old one to be substituted, and based on their requirements. In order to better evaluate the new solution, new requirements about its specific peculiarities are extracted from patents of similar solutions and considered in the evaluation. Requirements extraction is carried out automatically, through natural language processing, while the evaluation considers technical, marketing, and economic criteria. In particular, financial proceeds and patents investments were considered. The proposed method was applied in a real industrial case study were the substitution of carbon fiber heating mat over the copper heating mat was assessed. This study contributes to support creativity in innovation design by providing unknown requirements on which to work on the new product. In addition, it can stimulate the designer on this aim, by presenting the requirements along with new ideas, already implementing them in other fields/contexts that can act as sources of inspiration or creativity triggers.