The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

25.3. Up-Front Involvement: Before Product Definition

A growing area of interest is the motivation of companies to seek ways to innovate, expand beyond their traditional market spaces, use their technologies in new ways, and by other means transform their businesses to secure new profits. These activities often lie outside the traditional sequence of product development activities, and industrial designers can play a key part in them. In phased product development processes, this is often referred to as "Phase Zero" and is a nebulous state because all an organization has at this time is a general desire to produce something new and different.

The "what if?" mind-set of industrial designers is well suited for exploring alternative directions, investigating new applications, and seeking out unmet user needs that require novel solutions. User research (observation) is used as a stimulus for new insights into other potential solutions. Industrial designers are skilled at extrapolation, examining trends and combining them with markets and technologies to create new concepts. Designers are able to "suspend reality" when needed to set aside what is currently feasible to explore what is possible in the future. Outputs of these investigations can be captured and communicated in many ways (described later in more detail in the "Rapid Visualization" section).

Outputs of this front-end involvement can be the description of a new product or service concept that becomes the basis for a business ...