Innovative Design Thinking for Breakthrough Product Development

Concept generation is the most critical task in breakthrough product development. This paper presents an Innovative Design Thinking (IDT) framework that models concept generation as a proposition-making activity according to the formation definition of logic propositions. IDT formalizes designers' verbal statements as either analytic or synthetic propositions through a cyclic operation of “specify-ideate-validate” at each abstraction level to generate a design concept which is logically feasible, functionally simple, and physically certain. Then, IDT guides designers through a zigzagging process which repeats the same cyclic operation at progressively less abstract levels to complete concept generation. Details of this cyclic operation and the zigzagging process are explained in this paper with an illustrative example presented.