EVALUATION METHOD TO DETERMINE THE SUCCESS POTENTIAL AND THE DEGREE OF INNOVATION OF TECHNICAL PRODUCT IDEAS AND PRODUCTS

Innovative products are the key to success for all kinds of companies, especially in a highly competitive global market. The evaluation of innovative ideas and products with regard to their success potential – in terms of market penetration – and the degree of innovation is a special challenge for research and development departments as well as for management. The-refore a new evaluation method was developed to quantitatively determine these two charac-teristic values. The basis of the new method is Quality Function Deployment, which was modified and expanded to consider aspects of novelty and enhanced customer and manu-facturer benefit. The method was evaluated in five pilot projects of well-known companies from different in-dustries. The evaluation shows that the method can be used for evaluating both individual elements of a product development process and entire technical systems and that it makes “innovation ” measurable. The calculated evaluation figures are very well suited for decision making in the product development process. In combination with criteria of enterprise-specific planning strategies, decisive indications are made available to management to im-prove the capability for innovation. All in all the method makes a significant contribution to improving the product development process in terms of quality, time and costs