An approach for generating design scheme of new market disruptive products driven by function differentiation

•Propose a systematic design approach for developing new market disruptive products.•The differentiated design process of functions is accomplished by two steps.•A construct of performance rank is introduced in this study.•A disruptive innovative design scheme is proposed by using the approach.

New market disruption is an important type of disruptive innovation, and it has been recognized as an important innovation activity in engineering field with dynamic development of demand heterogeneity. A systematic approach for generating design schemes of products that may lead to new market disruption is proposed in this paper. The four steps in this approach include the construction of function layer structure, creation of performance layer, components configuration and the system optimization process. In the first two steps, a classification of functional roles and a construct of performance rank are introduced to capture new function sets and determine the realization degree of functions, and eventually realize the differentiated design of functions relative to the existing mainstream product. In the following two steps, two quantitative evaluation formulas are developed to determine which system should be disrupted for a second time and how to optimize the system. The two steps reduce the workload of modifying design scheme iteratively after the prototype had been manufactured, and eventually the design scheme is determined. The approach is applied to generate a disruptive innovative design scheme of a new type of automatic teller machine, and the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach is proved.