Supporting product innovation in uncertainty conditions: A u-sDSP based decision making approach

International competition intensification and product development process shortening have heightened the pressure to innovate, representing this issue nowadays a hallmark of all mature companies. Product innovation process is not always successful, due to its high level of uncertainty which makes difficult the best technical solutions selection, notably during the early stages of the product development process. Even if the decision making phase appears to be critical, formal and effective methodologies and tools are not often systematically applied in industry, and furthermore they lack both of rigor and of the capacity to really support human decision-making phases. In this paper a design paradigm is discussed in order to support the early phases of the product innovation process. Once evaluated the high potentials of TRIZ theory in supporting the idea generation phase, this work is focused on testing and improving the u-sDSP decision making approach in order to enable an agile implementation of this formal technique in the industrial context. The authors' proposed methodology is then applied to an industrial case study from the domestic appliances industry.