Development of product piracy robust products and production systems

Product imitations threaten the market success of many producers of original products and derogate their return in product innovations. Effective product protection requires a complementary bundle of strategic, product and process related, IT-based, labelling, communicative and legal protection measures - so called protection conceptions. The application of these protection measures needs to be planned at the early stages of the product development process: in the conceptual design of a product and the corresponding production system. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for the development of product piracy robust products and production systems and show its high application potential on the example of the development of a product piracy robust packaging machine. As the high amount of information on technologies, product functions and protection measures cannot be handled manually, large parts of the development process can be carried out using the Innovation-Database of the Heinz Nixdorf Institute.