A Framework for Sustainable Product Innovation based on TRIZ

Headed by Dr Ang Mei Choo.

Geran Universiti Penyelidikan (GUP)

The challenges of creating new innovative and sustainable products to capture market share are getting increasingly difficult in the current competitive global market. Top enterprises such as Samsung and Apple have adopted a variety of tools, methods and approaches including TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) to be ahead of competition. However, the application TRIZ has been well established in product innovation without consideration for sustainability. With current increasing emphasis on sustainable products, there is a crucial need to assist designers in sustainable product innovation particularly the local designers at conceptual design stage. Current methods and tools that consider product sustainability are mostly applied at the detail design stage or later stage which is based on life cycle assessment (LCA) or guidelines where the designers have nearly completed the design process. Any design change to improve sustainability made near the design completion stage will incur more cost, effort and may cause delay. There are not many researches works to help designers to design sustainable products in the conceptual design stage. This research explores the adaptation of advanced TRIZ tools particularly ARIZ to derive a novel framework to include considerations for sustainability to support designers in deriving sustainable and innovative product. A software prototype will be developed based on this framework to assess its performance and efficiency.