Preliminary findings on the engineering change process within incremental product design for competitive advantage - an empirical investigation

摘要

Bringing about engineering-change to maintain or improve a product's competitive position in the market place is one of the fundamental processes faced by industry. Although a great deal of academic research has been undertaken to describe and prescribe the new-product development process, relatively little has been undertaken with the objective of identifying best-practice for design change. This, in spite of the oftquoted view that designers rarely have the luxury of starting with a blank piece of paper. This paper draws together observations and conclusions from two EPSRC funded research programmes that have studied the strengths and weaknesses of the engineering-change process and provides some foresight into directions in the future.