Product Development Process Based on Open Technologies

摘要

Nowadays, the world is experiencing many changes, the technology is conquered by open hardware movement and the competition is based mainly on the development of ground-breaking products. These technological and economical changes are pushing companies to reinvent themselves to develop products that are cheaper, better and of good quality than competitors. An appealing avenue for these companies is to use open hardware solutions in the development of their new products. However, product development processes used nowadays are not suited to exploit the full potential of open hardware. This work addresses this issue by first performing an in-depth assessment of the academic literature on product innovation processes and later proposing a product development process based on open technologies. The process introduces a new product development rationale that includes four phases: the first phase is looking for opportunities, which involves generating opportunities and creative ideas. The second phase is the opportunity assessment phase, which consists of selecting and capturing opportunities. The third phase is the validation of opportunities phase through technical feasibility, client desirability and sustainability. The fourth phase is engineering design, which includes concept generation, prototyping testing, and product manufacturing. The developed process hopes to open the way for businesses, especially in emerging countries like Morocco, to be competitive on the market by helping them designing superior products based on open technologies.