Creativity Engineering for Continuous and Discontinuous Innovation

Concurrent engineering (CE) has been widely implemented in industries to cause the developers to consider all elements of product lifecycle during the product design phase. And, it has been proved that concurrent engineering has its most impact on helping industries find design change requirements in the early design stage, and deliver rapid time to market for a new product. However, although concurrent engineering is a very effective approach for product design team-up, it does not help generate genuine product concepts. As stated by Miller and Morris, to succeed in innovation, it is first necessary to find effective and practical models, which must be workable systems that achieve consistent results. Further, the goal of innovation must be a consistently effective, manageable practice of continuous innovation and discontinuous innovation. In order to build a successful innovation model, research has been done to investigate how concurrent engineering can be extended to a new concept which will cover not only the downstream phase from design concept to the entire product design process, but also the upstream phase from brainstorming to the generation process of new product concepts. Result shows that a product knowledge and innovation (PKI) system based on the concepts of creativity engineering (CE-II), which is extended from the current practice of concurrent engineering, can be used to achieve the goal for both continuous and discontinuous innovation