Functional product innovation : reaping the benefits of simulation driven design

Despite a tradition in selling and developing physical artefacts while viewing services as add-ons, the view on products in Swedish industry extends to include total offers, i.e., service provision. The service providing companies take extended long-term responsibilities regarding the physical artefact and the agreed upon functions. The changed business scenario affects product development, in particular the early phases. A life-cycle perspective, cross-company collaboration and customer needs are issues to take into consideration early on in product development. An extended enterprise business model is presented in this paper to give a notion of the changed input for product development. This is done for the purpose of discussing a simulation driven design approach in relation to a vision for functional product innovation. In an engineering design environment, computational support is commonly used to provide a basis for decisions in product development. In this paper we suggest a new, and additional, way to think about design and to use simulations. We suggest that simulations should be used to drive, and not only verify, the design of a product, and thereby also nurture innovations.Godkänd; 2007; 20061127 (tobias)Fastelaboratoriet – VINNEXC, ProViking - Development of Functional Products in a Distributed Virtual Environmen