The product development process 103 The product design process is subject to a set of requirements(product design specification), including basic and desirable product functions, performance aesthetics and cost(Dasgupta, 1996). This is common to many industrial areas but is now only becoming accepted in the food industry. Firstly, the consumers and product designers, very often with marketers, come together to develop a product concept, and then the technologists and engineers are brought in to develop the product design specification. Some of you may be thinking that this is sounding rather complicated, but actually you do it all the time but may be doing it without clear directions. Designers and the consumers have difficulty in working in the abstract and there is some design taking place either in drawings computer descriptions or 'mock-up products. Creativity starts here. It is a useless exercise for marketing to work alone with consumers to develop a product concept and then hand it to the food designer/technologist and say make this! That seldom leads to unique products. There needs to be cooperation among marketing, consumer and the product designers(or food technologists/ product developers as they are often called in the food indust The areas in building the product concept for design are (Ulrich and identifying consumer needs; establishing target product brief, analysis of competitive products concept generation concept selection The project team works between these areas. Firstly they study consumers trying to build their needs into more specific terms in the product brief, and at the same time studying the competing products. Then they go back to the consumers with more defined product types to generate specific product oncepts. Finally they work the product concepts into more specific and detail product descriptions and go back to the consumers to find their reactions The product concept progresses through the product development project from the original idea to the final product specifications controlling production and the final product proposition that is the basis for the marketing. It is refined and expanded in two different ways because of the different end uses-in a technical, quantitative description and in a consumer-based, in-depth, descrip- tion as shown in Fig. 3.4 The outcomes needed in the first stage are the design product concept and the design product specifications. These start from a name or a simple description in the product development programme, and firstly the team generates ideas for the product and then with consumers builds simple product idea concepts. After evaluation these are reduced to one or two product ideas, and research with consumers and the market gradually builds up the product concept for design This is then integrated with the processing and marketing technologies, and the product concept is built up by product concept engineering into metric descriptions in the product design specification. The design product concept isThe product design process is subject to a set of requirements (product design specification), including basic and desirable product functions, performance, aesthetics and cost (Dasgupta, 1996). This is common to many industrial areas but is now only becoming accepted in the food industry. Firstly, the consumers and product designers, very often with marketers, come together to develop a product concept, and then the technologists and engineers are brought in to develop the product design specification. Some of you may be thinking that this is sounding rather complicated, but actually you do it all the time but may be doing it without clear directions. Designers and the consumers have difficulty in working in the abstract and there is some design taking place either in drawings, computer descriptions or ‘mock-up’ products. Creativity starts here. It is a useless exercise for marketing to work alone with consumers to develop a product concept and then hand it to the food designer/technologist and say make this! That seldom leads to unique products. There needs to be cooperation among marketing, consumer and the product designers (or food technologists/ product developers as they are often called in the food industry). The areas in building the product concept for design are (Ulrich and Eppinger, 1995): • identifying consumer needs; • establishing target product brief; • analysis of competitive products; • concept generation; • concept selection. The project team works between these areas. Firstly they study consumers, trying to build their needs into more specific terms in the product brief, and at the same time studying the competing products. Then they go back to the consumers with more defined product types to generate specific product concepts. Finally they work the product concepts into more specific and detailed product descriptions and go back to the consumers to find their reactions. The product concept progresses through the product development project from the original idea to the final product specifications controlling production and the final product proposition that is the basis for the marketing. It is refined and expanded in two different ways because of the different end uses – in a technical, quantitative description and in a consumer-based, in-depth, descrip￾tion as shown in Fig. 3.4. The outcomes needed in the first stage are the design product concept and the design product specifications. These start from a name or a simple description in the product development programme, and firstly the team generates ideas for the product and then with consumers builds simple product idea concepts. After evaluation these are reduced to one or two product ideas, and research with consumers and the market gradually builds up the product concept for design. This is then integrated with the processing and marketing technologies, and the product concept is built up by product concept engineering into metric descriptions in the product design specification. The design product concept is The product development process 103