CREATIVITY ENGINEERING FOR CONTINUOUS AND DISCONTINUOUS INNOVATION

Concurrent engineering (CE) has been widely implemented in many industries so that developers can consider all elements of the product lifecycle during the product design phase. However, although concurrent engineering is a very effective approach for product design team-up, it does not help to generate new product concepts. To build a successful innovation model, research has investigated how concurrent engineering can be extended to a new concept which covers 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. Results show 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 goals for both continuous and fusion-type discontinuous innovation.