A Green-Innovative Product Development Process for Satisfying the Requirements of Stakeholders

This study aims to develop a new methodology that meets the requirements of customers and the environment in a reliable process to recognize the important product’s requirements and accurately transform them into innovative product design concepts. The methodology proposes a novel way to integrate the Kano model, and QFDE and TRIZ methods to precisely capture stakeholder requirements, and transform them into product specifications for innovative products. The methodology consists of four steps. Step 1 starts with classifying the product’s requirements according to the Kano profiles and stakeholders’ requirements. In step 2, results from phase 1 serve as an important factor to determine improvement targets. Step 3 analyses the improvement challenges and selects the most relevant inventive principles to solve contradiction problems. Step 4 uses the selected inventive principles, with the help of relevant literature, to generate specific solutions that can satisfy the requirements. A case study in desk lamp improvement is used as an example to illustrate the proposed methodology. The specific solutions innovated from the methodology have benefits that fulfil the stakeholder requirements and are in line with proven references such as patents and journal papers. The results show that this methodology can accurately incorporate the important product requirements into the product design and help product designers to create innovative design concepts.