EXHIBIT 8-4 Concept selection is an iterative process closely related to concept generation and testing. The concept screening and scoring methods help the team refine and improve the concepts, leading to one or more promising concepts upon which further testing and development activities will be focused.
The concept selection method in this chapter is built around the use of decision matrices for evaluating each concept with respect to a set of selection criteria.
A Structured Method Offers Several Benefits
All of the front-end activities of product development have tremendous influence on eventual product success. Certainly the response of the market to a product depends critically on the product concept, but many practitioners and researchers also believe that the choice of a product concept dramatically constrains the eventual manufacturing cost of the product. A structured concept selection process helps to maintain objectivity through out the concept phase of the development process and guides the product development team through a critical, difficult, and sometimes emotional process. Specifically, a structured concept selection method offers the following potential benefits:
• A customer-focused product: Because concepts are explicitly evaluated against customer-oriented criteria, the selected concept is likely to be focused on the customer.
• A competitive design: By benchmarking concepts with respect to existing designs, designers push the design to match or exceed their competitors' performance along key dimensions.