Product development guided by value analysis through collaborative R&D

It is widely known that SME-type companies often do not have dedicated product design teams in-house. They have to rely on third-party competences when a completely new problem presents itself, or when they are already fully committed to other, more urgent, money-making tasks, on their day-to-day struggle to stay competitive. The present work is a report of collaboration between a SME-type company and a university research team to jointly develop an improved cloth peg. The use of value analysis within the product development process was a major challenge that proved to be a very strong method to quantify concept worthiness in terms of value to the customer. The experience with this project was very fruitful, in that it fulfilled completely the initial objectives, but the barriers along the way were tough to overcome, due to several aspects related directly to the different cultures where the industrial and university groups belong to.