Fundamentals of product innovation

The course ‘Fundamentals of Product Innovation’ is built around lectures and assignments. The lectures start by explaining the overall purpose and objectives of product innovation and by detailing the stages of the product innovation process, which entail predevelopment, development and commercialization respectively. Next, the activities carried out in each stage of the product innovation process and the methods and tools that can be applied are covered step by step.
The predevelopment stage entails activities such as opportunity identification, idea generation and selection, all necessary upfront activities to prioritize the later work in the innovation process. Then, the course looks at concept generation and evaluation, and how selected concepts move to the development stage. Here the course looks at all activities, such as prototyping, cost and demand forecasting, to technically develop and successfully market the new product. Finally, the course proceeds to the commercialization stage, where decisions on the new product launch and the ramping-up of the production need to be taken.

To incorporate some necessary form of product innovation practice, the lectures are accompanied by assignments. The assignments concentrate on different stages and activities of the product innovation process. The first assignment focuses on the predevelopment stage and requires students to assess a set of new product ideas with the goal to further improve the best idea. For doing so, students will be required to apply and adapt tools such as the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) or the House of Quality from Quality Function Deployment (QFD). In the second assignment, students focus on the development stage. They use different tools for taking important decisions throughout the product innovation process, such as, for deciding whether a project should move to development, which means substantial investments will be made. Various tools, for example TRIZ, the Bass diffusion model or the ARTA sales forecast method, are applied. The third assignment focuses on the commercialization stage where students are asked to analyze and improve the launch plan of an existing new product by reflecting upon best practices in successful new product launch and using techniques like Fault Tree Analysis to prevent new product failure.

Product innovation is the main driver of growth, profitability and survival of organizations in high-tech industries. The course ‘Fundamentals of Product Innovation’ takes a process perspective on product innovation by focusing on the tactical and operational aspects of product innovation. Completing the course will enable industrial engineering students to:

• Understand and describe the process of product innovation, explain the importance of its successful operation, and name the most important methods and tools to do so;

• Apply, analyze, measure and improve product innovation processes, methods and tools in different types of organizations.

​In follow-up courses offered by the ITEM group, the Marketing Perspectives on Product Innovation (1ZV20), Strategic and Organizational Perspectives of Product Innovation (1ZV70), Sustainability Perspectives on Product Innovation (1ZK20) will be covered.

You must meet the following requirements

• Registered for a degree programme other than
• HBO-TOP Applied Physics, Pre-Master
• Completed none of the course modules listed below
• Product innovation processes (1ZV30)

• Chapters 1-17 of: Crawford, M. and Di Benedetto, A. (2021): New Products Management, 12th Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 978-1-260-57508-8 (paperback) 9781260590548 (e-book)
• Scientific articles and lecture slides