The Approach for Identifying Opportunities in Product Innovation Design through Requirement Conflict Analysis

This study introduces a method to explore and broaden potential design avenues for a product by identifying opportunities for innovative design through requirement conflicts. The process involves clarifying user-expected demands using the Ideal Final Result approach and identifying potential conflicts by assessing product performance constraints and user expectations. Utilizing standardized representations of requirement conflicts, a knowledge retrieval technique based on expanding co-referential relationships is applied to analyze these conflicts. A judgment matrix is created to pinpoint clues for recognizing innovative design opportunities initially. Furthermore, the nine-windows method is utilized to expand and identify innovation opportunities along the time and system axis, leading to the identification of two types of innovation opportunities and their expanded outcomes. Ultimately, the method’s feasibility and practicality are validated by identifying innovative design opportunities within the context of the alpine tunnel construction system.