Matthew N.

Saunders
e-mail: mattnsaunders@gmail.com

The Characteristics of Innovative, Mechanical Products1

Many new products fail upon introduction to the marketplace, but a few products are exceptionally successful, earning innovation awards and other benchmarks of success. To better understand the features of those innovative products, 197 award-winning products are analyzed to identify the characteristics that distinguish those products from the competition. For the analysis, a set of product-level characteristics is identied and organized into categories, which include functionality, architecture, external interactions, user interactions, and cost. Based on their innovation award citations, the products are analyzed with respect to the set of characteristics, and results are tabulated. Several awardwinning products are also compared with competitive products on the shelves of major retail stores. On average, award-winning products display multiple characteristics of innovation. Overall, a vast majority (more than two-thirds) of the award-winning products exhibit enhanced user interactions, with a similar percentage displaying enhanced external interactions, compared with approximately one-third of products offering an additional function and approximately half displaying innovative architectures. The award-winning products also exhibit an average of approximately two more characteristics than their competitors on retail shelves, along with signicantly higher rates of innovative architecture, external interactions, and user interactions. The analysis concludes with a discussion of the implications of these ndings for engineering design methods. DOI: 10.1115/1.4003409

Carolyn C. Seepersad2
e-mail: ccseepersad@mail.utexas.edu Department of Mechanical Engineering, Product, Process and Materials Design Laboratory, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712

Katja Hltt-Otto
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA 02747-2300 e-mail: katja.holtta-otto@umassd.edu

Introduction

On average, approximately half of new product development projects are successful 1. A large number of products fail upon introduction to the marketplace, with the failure rate of new products varying from about 30% to 90% depending on the novelty of the market, the product category, and the industry 24. In contrast, a small fraction of new products are very successful and conquer the competition with signicantly larger market shares, greater prot margins, or better brand recognition. Successful products are typically described as products that satisfy customer needs in particularly innovative or unexpected ways. From the perspective of the Kano diagram 5 in Fig. 1, successful products delight customers. In a Kano diagram, standard must-have features are so common that customers are disappointed unless they are implemented expertly. Baseline features satisfy customers with their presence, and the level of satisfaction typically depends on the degree of functionality. The most successful products, on the other hand, tend to incorporate features that delight the customer, by performing beyond his or her expectations. Since the delightful features exceed the customers expectations, it is unusual for a customer to articulate these needs in a typical interview or survey. The development of a new product typically starts with identifying customer needs. Unfortunately, the typical needs articulated by a customer fall under the baseline or must-have needs in the Kano diagram, and fullling these needs is not enough to create an innovative product. How could one create a delight? In this paper, a set of innovative products is identied from major innovation award lists and analyzed with respect to a set of product-level characteristics. The focus is specically on productlevel characteristics that describe observable features of a product
1 This is a revised version of Paper No. DETC2009-87382, published in the ASME IDETC Design Theory and Methodology Conference. 2 Corresponding author. Contributed by the Design Theory and Methodology Committee of ASME for publication in the JOURNAL OF MECHANICAL DESIGN. Manuscript received November 18, 2009; nal manuscript received December 21, 2010; published online February 8, 2011. Assoc. Editor: Jonathan Cagan.

itself, such as functionality and architecture, rather than enterprise- or market-level characteristics, such as prot or market share. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether specic characteristics are more prevalent in award-winning products, relative to their competitors, and to identify any trends that could be important for engineering innovation.

Literature Review

Numerous underlying factors can inuence the success of a product. Cooper 6 classied these factors into the following categories: market, synergy of product and rms skills, characteristics of the product venture, execution of development, the product itself, and information found during development. Within these categories, 18 dimensions of success were identied from related literature. The same list has been modied and supported by numerous researchers 710, and similar lists have been suggested by additional studies 1114. Despite the fact that different categories may be more or less applicable to different markets and cultures 6,7,10,15, there seems to be general agreement that factors ranging from the market to the rm to the product itself affect product success. With the abundance of factors inuencing product success, it is difcult to draw a linear relationship between technical innovation and product success, but the majority of research suggests that innovation and competitive advantage are leading factors in product success 68,10,16,14. For the sake of this study, an innovative product is dened as a product that changes or has the potential to change the nature of the marketplace by satisfying a new or latent customer need or by satisfying customer needs in a signicantly new way. In contrast, a breakthrough product is dened as an innovative product that has already experienced commercial success in the context of numerous market and business inuences. While numerous factors inuence the success of a product, a products level of innovation is affected most directly at the product design stage. Designers are currently told to innovate, but few tools are provided to help a designer maximize the likelihood of product success. Should the designer add an additional function, reduce product size, make the product easier to use, or pursue FEBRUARY 2011, Vol. 133 / 021009-1

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Fig. 1 Kano diagram 5

other options? What are the characteristics of innovative products? The dilemma begins with the difculty of gathering customer needs to create innovative products. Several sources suggest that the creation of highly innovative or breakthrough products cannot be done with traditional customer needs analysis because the needs are latent, or not yet articulated 17,18,12,19,20. Some customer analysis tools, such as voice of the customer VOC 21 and the lead user method 17, claim to result in more successful products than other methods; however, product success is far from guaranteed. In some instances, engineers are tasked with incorporating design requirements forced upon the product from large retailers just to get the product on the shelf 22. These tradeoffs in a design not only hinder potential innovation, but also may lead to decreased commercial success 23. The difculty of creating innovative products is further exacerbated by apparent differences in customer evaluation and acceptance of innovative products based on their similarity to related products 18,24. The more successful products seem to be difcult for customers to categorize because they do not t neatly into pre-existing product categories. Customers spend more time analyzing innovative products, and cannot make quick decisions based on previous experiences. Customers evaluations of innovative products often demonstrate lack of familiarity, irrationality, user-product interaction problems, uncertainty, and xation on seemingly trivial details of the product 25. These nonfunctional concerns are important to customers purchasing decisions, but they are difcult for engineers to evaluate in the early stages of development because they require research into potential consumer behavior and responses to the design 26. Furthermore, several studies support that product development and management differ greatly for different levels of innovation 2730,16,31,32. It is not only challenging to extract useful information from customers, but it is also difcult to characterize the appropriate target level of innovation. In a comparison of innovation factors cited in literature, Garcia and Calantone 33 identied more than 15 constructs of innovation with 51 attributes. They merged existing terminology and distinguished incremental, really new, and radical forms of innovation to clarify and unify the theories of innovation. Incremental innovation is the classical approach of utilizing customer needs analysis to create slight generational improvements to an existing product. Radical innovations cause disruption of the marketplace by introducing a breakthrough technology. Really new innovation can be any combination of factors between incremental and radical. These classications are supported with s-curves 34,35, in which products experience slow evolution in their initial development, followed by an accelerated series of improvements, only to level off into a nal period of slow development. In this way, the evolution of a product follows an S shaped pattern of improvement on a plot of quality or functionality over time. Discontinuities in improvement, or jumps, 021009-2 / Vol. 133, FEBRUARY 2011

create new curves of higher quality. Garcia and Calantone 33 suggested that the market of a product also follows an s-curve and that radical innovation is dened by causing jumps on both a products technology and market curves. Really new innovation is characterized by a jump in either curve, but not both. Incremental innovation is classied as movement along existing curves. Innovation should therefore be viewed as a relative property as suggested by Dewar and Dutton 36 because it is inherently based on the degree to which one product distinguishes itself from preceding and competing products. Based on these classications, literature suggests that radical innovation is rare and occurs in less than 20% of innovations, while incremental innovation is much more widespread 33. Despite all of this research on innovation, engineering design tools provide very little guidance on the product-level characteristics of innovative products. Available product attribute checklists, including categories for decomposing product specications and checklists for embodying concepts 3739, do not directly encourage innovation for the sake of potential market success. These lists are normally used throughout the design process to ensure that all aspects of a products development cycle are considered, but they do not provide guidance for competitive advantage or innovation. While the majority of the characteristics of innovation developed in this study correlate with items on these lists e.g., function, layout, energy, ergonomics, and costs, their importance is lost with the inclusion of so many other engineering factors of product design e.g., production, quality control, assembly, transport, and scheduling in the lists. They do not help differentiate and distinguish one concept from another at the state of ideation, which is a promising time to evaluate concepts for potential innovation and success according to Goldenberg et al. 13. A few design tools are available for this critical early stage of development. The creation of a project mission statement 39, for example, encourages identication of potential areas of innovation at the beginning of a design project, but no guidelines are provided to examine potential areas thoroughly. Also, there are many creativity and brainstorming tools that help create as many ideas as possible. Examples include 6-3-5 40,38, C-sketch 41, TRIZ 42, design by analogy 43, design through transformation 44, and biomimetic concept generation 45. Similarly, there are numerous tools for selecting the concept that best meets customer requirements e.g., Refs. 4648. Interestingly, however, Cooper 1 found that many concept selection methods are designed to select mediocre concepts, because the methods do not use product superiority as a criterion and therefore do not lead to breakthrough products. Additionally, benchmarking the competition 39,49 is an important part of the house of quality 21 for comparing a product to leading competitors and connecting customer needs with engineering specications; however, this tool, as well as adaptations of it 50, may suffer from the challenges of extracting customer needs effectively and moving beyond incremental innovation. The aforementioned tools, from customer needs analysis to the house of quality, are available to all designers, but somehow only a fraction of products can truly claim to be breakthrough products. What is it that makes a product stand out from the competition? It has been shown that factors such as development of a clear product strategy and willingness to take risks 1 contribute to good business performance from the management point of view, but what about the engineering design process? It would be helpful to document the types of product-level characteristics typically embodied by innovative products, so that those criteria can be used to drive the design process and evaluate resulting designs.

Research Methodology

A research methodology was developed to establish a set of product-level characteristics of innovative products and to use those characteristics for analyzing trends among award-winning, innovative products. The research proceeded in a series of four Transactions of the ASME

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steps: 1 developing a comprehensive list of product-level characteristics of innovation, 2 selecting innovative products to be analyzed, 3 analyzing the products with respect to the characteristics identied in the rst step, and 4 comparing a subset of the award-winning products to non-award-winning competitors available in major retail stores. A subsection is devoted to describing each of the steps. 3.1 Developing a Set of Product-Level Characteristics of Innovation. The goal of this step was to compile a set of productlevel characteristics that describe innovative products. Productlevel characteristics are those that describe observable features of the product itself, such as architecture or functionality, rather than enterprise- or market-level characteristics such as market share or protability. The product-level characteristics are selected to be domain-independent, comprehensive, and mutually independent. A domain-independent characteristic can be used to describe various types of products, rather than a specic product e.g., material ow versus miles/gal. The characteristics in a mutually independent set should not overlap; in other words, it should be possible to identify a product that exhibits one specic characteristic without exhibiting the remaining characteristics. A comprehensive set of characteristics should be sufcient for describing any innovation in the domain of interest. The mechanical domain, including mechanical, electromechanical, and thermomechanical products, was the focus of this study; innovations that are purely chemical, electrical, or materials-related, without a mechanical component, were not considered in the study. With these requirements in mind, the characteristics of innovative products were compiled by reviewing published award citations of award-winning, innovative products selected according to the procedure described in Sec. 3.2, along with relevant design methodology tools and terminology. While reviewing each product, the researchers asked the following: What features made the product more innovative than competing products at the time of its release? The review was conducted from the perspective of the customer, rather than the manufacturer or the designer. For example, customers cited a products compact size as innovative, rather than the advances in material processing and manufacturing that enabled it; therefore, improved size was identied as a potential characteristic of innovative products. Characteristics were added to the set as necessary to accurately describe the differences between products. The set was rened for comprehensiveness, mutual independence, and domain-independence. For validation purposes, characteristics were developed independently by two of the authors and then critically evaluated and merged into a unied set. The names and denitions of several characteristics were informed by standard terminology from functional modeling and product architecture literature cf. Refs. 51,38,52. Also, the nal set was compared with other lists of product criteria, such as the requirements list checklist provided by Pahl and Beitz 38 to verify its completeness.3 As shown in Table 1, ve major categories of innovation were identied: functionality, architecture, external interactions, user interactions, and cost. The rst category is used to evaluate whether the breakthrough product offers a signicant new function, relative to competitive products. The second category is used to evaluate whether there are any architectural innovations related to size, layout, or usage context in the breakthrough products that are not generally found in competitive products. The external interactions category addresses modied ows of material, energy, or information into or out of a functional model of the product. A modication includes a change in the type of ow e.g., electrical energy replaced with solar energy in a solarpowered device or in the magnitude of the ow e.g., a more
3 It should be emphasized that these characteristics were compiled by the authors, based on a careful review of the design methodology literature and award-winning innovative products. Accordingly, they do not necessarily match all of the judging criteria for the innovation awards cited in this paper.

Table 1 Characteristics of innovation

Functionality Additional function: Allows the user to solve a new problem or perform a new function while still performing the function of the comparison product. Architecture Modied size: The physical dimensions during operation or storage have changed in expansion or compaction beyond subtle or incremental differences. Modied physical layout: The same elements of the product are still present, but the physical architecture has changed. Expanded usage physical environment: The product can now be used in more usage environments with different resource availabilities or different physical characteristics. External interactions Modied material ow: Accepts or creates different materials or uses materials in new ways. Modied energy ow: Utilizes new sources of energy or converts to a different form of energy than previously used. Modied information ow: Different types or amounts of information are being gathered, processed, or output/displayed. Interaction with infrastructure: The product interacts with previously owned infrastructure. User interactions Modied physical demands: The product is easier to use physically beyond subtle or incremental differences. Modied sensory demands: The product is easier to use from a sensory stand point beyond subtle or incremental differences. Modied mental demands: The product is easier to use mentally beyond subtle or incremental differences. Cost (secondary characteristic) Purchase cost: Purchase cost is signicantly different. Operating cost: Operating and/or maintenance costs are signicantly different.

fuel-efcient vehicle. The external interactions category also includes product interactions with pre-existing infrastructure, such as data formats, standardized connectors, or other types of preexisting hardware, software, services, or networks. The user interactions category is used to evaluate whether the innovative products are more user-friendly than competitive products. For example, the physical demands characteristic refers to innovations that make the product easier to use under various physical conditions, including permanent or temporary physical disabilities. The sensory demands characteristic includes innovations that enhance ease of use for sensory-impaired persons or persons with temporary sensory impairment e.g., a cell phone user at a loud concert. The modied cognitive demand characteristic refers to innovations that make it easier to understand a product, including its assembly, operation, and/or inputs/outputs. Finally, cost is included as a secondary characteristic that sometimes accompanies other characteristics e.g., a change in design enables both modied material ows and reduced operating costs. The sample products in Table 2 illustrate several of the innovation characteristics. The Vicks forehead thermometer, illustrated in Fig. 2, is a thermometer designed to eliminate the difculty of taking a childs temperature by accurately measuring temperature from the forehead rather than the standard mouth, ear, rectal, or armpit methods. It also displays a background color based on the grade of the fever, ranging from green for no fever to red for high fever. Relative to competing, home-use thermometers, the colorcoded display increases the amount of information displayed, as recorded in the Modied information ow column of Table 2. It also makes it easier for the user to determine if a fever exists without having to memorize appropriate temperature ranges, as classied by the Modied cognitive demands column in Table FEBRUARY 2011, Vol. 133 / 021009-3

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Table 2 Sample products that illustrate characteristics of innovation Product Vicks forehead thermometer Comparative product Children digital thermometer Function Additional function Architecture Modied size Modied physical layout Expanded usage environment External interactions Modied material ow Modied energy ow Modied information ow Interaction with infrastructure User interactions Modied physical demands Modied sensory demands Modied cognitive demands Cost Purchase Maintenance Running pedometer Home vacuum sealer Nike+ Oliso Frisper

Fig. 3 Nike+ Apple iPod pedometer attachment 54

2. The thermometer also embodies modied physical demands because it is physically easier to measure a childs temperature on the forehead, relative to other locations. The Nike+ is a jogging pedometer attachment for Apple iPod digital music players see Fig. 3. A small piezoelectric measuring unit placed in or on a joggers shoe collects pace data, and communicates it wirelessly to an iPod attachment, which broadcasts current and average workout pace through the iPod headphones. When connected to a computer, the device sends data from previous workouts to an online account that helps runners track their distance, pace, and running routes. These features justify marks in the Additional function and Modied information ow columns in Table 2. The connection between the pedometer and an iPod and a computer is an advantageous interaction with infrastructure. In this sense, the infrastructure interaction is manifested both geometrically, by attaching to the iPod, and digitally, by exchanging data between the shoe-based module and the iPod. Compared with competing, one-piece pedometers, the Nike+ is both smaller in size modied size and modular modied physical layout. The use of a piezoelectric accelerometer in the

foot unit is considered a modied energy ow because competing products used springs and lever arms at the time of its release, which require more energy. The Nike+ also provides modied sensory demands by allowing users to hear their data over the iPod headphones in addition to tracking it visually. The Oliso Frisper is a home vacuum sealer that punctures a tiny hole in any closable plastic bag, removes the air, and then heatseals the hole to ensure a vacuum see Fig. 4. As opposed to traditional vacuum sealers that require specialized bags, this method of sealing allows a variety of bags to be continually reused, and it is not required to span the full length of the bag to operate properly. The puncturing and resealing mechanism is considered a modied energy ow, and it allows the Oliso Frisper to be considerably more compact than the competition, as recorded in the Modied size column in Table 2. The Oliso

Fig. 2 Vicks forehead thermometer 53

Fig. 4 Oliso Frisper home vacuum sealer 55

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Table 3 Product selection criteria The innovative product must be mechanical or hardware-related. The innovation must be related to the functionality of the product, rather than its aesthetics alone. The product must be successful or potentially successful in the marketplace. The product must be available in the marketplace i.e., no prototypes. The product must be an end consumer product, rather than a component. The product must have changed or have the potential to change the marketplace. The product must be relevant to the U.S. market.

the product class that a customer would most likely consider purchasing, instead of the innovative product, at the time the innovation award was issued. For example, an iPod would be compared with other digital music players, rather than a compact disk player. 3.4 Comparing Award-Winning Innovative Products to Non-Award-Winning Competitors Available in Major Retail Stores. For this analysis, the 2007 and 2008 editions of the award lists were analyzed to identify the subset of products that were available on the in-store shelves of major national or regional retail stores, including Target, Best Buy, Frys, Sears, and HEB a regional Texas grocery chain. In selecting the comparison products, the objective was to identify the non-award-winning products that a customer would most likely consider purchasing instead of the award-winning product. To provide a standardized means of selecting non-award-winning products that offered a fair and challenging comparison to the award-winning products, a set of selection criteria was devised. First, the authors considered only products on the same in-store retail shelves as the awardwinning product; product offerings from other retailers, including on-line retailers, were excluded from consideration. Second, each comparison product was required to exhibit similar basic functionality and similar levels of innovation characteristics as the awardwinning product, relative to the most basic products on the shelf. For example, the Vicks forehead thermometer, described in Sec. 3.1 and Fig. 2, was compared with several non-award-winning baby thermometers on the shelves of its retail store. All of the comparison products offered similar basic functionality of measuring and displaying the body temperature of a child, but they also offered noticeable enhancements in functionality, architecture, or user or external interaction characteristics, relative to the most basic oral, armpit, ear, or rectal baby thermometers. For example, one competing product was offered in the form of a pacier, a modied architectural characteristic layout, and several products offered color-coded temperature readings, a user interaction modied cognitive demand and external interaction modied information ow characteristic. Each award-winning product was analyzed for innovation characteristics by comparing it to the non-award-winning products in its comparison set. Similarly, each non-award-winning product was analyzed by comparing it to the award-winning product and to the other non-award-winning products in the set. Only features that were unique to a specic product earned innovation characteristics. For example, several baby thermometers offered colorcoded temperatures, including the Vicks forehead thermometer, so none of them earned innovation characteristics for that feature. However, only one product was offered in the form of a pacier, a unique architectural feature that earned a modied layout characteristic for that non-award-winning product. 3.5 Analyzing Repeatability. The repeatability of the analysis was assessed with inter-rater agreement, which measures the degree to which two judges assign the same ratings to each alternative 56. Specically, Cohens 57 kappa coefcient K and standard percent agreement were used to calculate inter-rater agreement. Kappa coefcient values range from 1, which represents complete disagreement, to 0, which represents chance agreement, to 1, which represents perfect agreement. Generally, interrater agreement of 0.40 or less is considered poor agreement; 0.40.75 is considered fair to good agreement; and 0.75 and above is considered excellent 58,59. Percent agreement was calculated as the direct proportion of agreements to the total possible number of agreements. In this evaluation, judges were considered to agree if both indicated that a product satised or did not satisfy an innovation characteristic. Initially, lists of approximately ten sample products were evaluated by two of the authors independently. Differences were discussed as a means of training the judges and clarifying the denitions of the characteristics in Table 1. The procedure was repeated until an acceptable level of inter-rater agreement was achieved for the sample products. Initial FEBRUARY 2011, Vol. 133 / 021009-5

Frisper also exhibits improved Interaction with infrastructure because it can be used with existing household sealable bags. The product also earns a reduced Cost designation because the customer can use any sealable plastic bag rather than expensive, specialized bags and reuse the original bag countless times without loss of function. 3.2 Selecting Innovative Products for Analysis. Products were selected from three published lists of innovative products: Time magazines Inventions of the Year, Popular Science magazines Best of Whats New, and Industrial Designers Society of Americas IDSA International Design Excellence Awards IDEA. Products were selected from these lists, rather than personal research by the authors, to avoid any researcher bias in the selection of products. The lists also provided a wide assortment of products to support a relatively broad analysis of innovation, with the Time list oriented toward the general public, the Popular Science list toward scientic-minded readers, and IDEA toward industrial designers and other professionals. As shown in Table 3, a set of criteria was developed for selecting products from the published lists. Since the purpose of this study was to investigate mechanical innovation, products with no signicant mechanical component were eliminated e.g., new software, materials, or chemicals. The innovation also needed to be function-related, rather than a purely cosmetic or aesthetic change. This criterion eliminated fashion and most clothing, except for a few that demonstrated mechanical innovation. Also, products were required to be commercially available; prototypes were eliminated to ensure design feasibility. Only end consumer products were considered, rather than components e.g., engines and transmissions. Since products were evaluated from a consumer perspective, it was difcult to evaluate components that were isolated from a parent product. The ability of a product to change or potentially change a marketplace was a signicant criterion, which most of the products met by virtue of appearing on one of the innovation lists. Finally, it was necessary for the product to be relevant to the United States market, rather than international markets, so that the United States-based researchers could evaluate the product relative to competing products. The selection criteria were used to extract products from the published parent lists. After analyzing the 20032008 editions of each parent list, 197 products were obtained. Although additional products could be obtained from earlier editions of the lists, the product count was hypothesized to be large enough to provide signicant insights on innovation. This hypothesis is revisited in Sec. 4. Overall 45, 104, and 80 products were extracted from the Time, Popular Science, and IDSA lists, respectively, with 29 of those products receiving awards from multiple lists. 3.3 Analyzing Award-Winning Innovative Products. Each of the 197 products was analyzed with respect to the innovation characteristics in Table 1. A sample analysis is illustrated in Table 2. Analysis was based on the description of the product in the award list. Each product was analyzed with respect to a comparative product. The comparative product was selected by identifying Journal of Mechanical Design

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Table 4 Award-winning product analysis by innovation characteristics and categories Percent of products with at least one criterion Percent of products with each criterion for each category % % Function Additional function Architecture Modied size Modied physical layout Expanded usage environment External interactions Modied material ow Modied energy ow Modied information ow Interaction with infrastructure User interactions Modied physical demands Modied sensory demands Modied cognitive demands Cost Purchase Maintenance 38.1 23.4 36.0 26.9 10.2 41.6 34.5 20.8 48.7 14.2 15.7 2.5 7.1 38.1 60.9

Table 5 Results of in-store comparison of award-winning versus non-award-winning products P-values are based on a t-test of the null hypothesis that the average numbers of characteristics are equal for the two groups Average number of characteristics per product Award-winning products Overall Function Architecture External interactions User interactions Cost 2.9 0.3 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.1 Non-award-winning products 0.5 0.07 0.2 0.1 0.09 0.0 P-value 0.00003 0.058 0.001 0.004 0.008 0.08

80.2

68.5

9.1

inter-rater agreement fell in the 0.65K, or 85% agreement, range between authors, but discussion and clarication of the innovation characteristics and their denitions raised the level to 0.75K, or 90% agreement, for new samples of independently analyzed products. Then, 49 products, or 25% of the total number of products, were analyzed independently by two of the authors. A high interrater agreement was observed in the form of Cohens kappa and percent agreement levels of 0.68K and 88%, respectively, and the two authors differed in their analysis of the number of products in each innovation category by less than 8%.

Results

After all of the award-winning products were evaluated, the results were analyzed by characteristics and overarching categories, as shown in Table 4. The rst column lists all of the characteristics of innovation identied in Sec. 3, with category headings highlighted in bold. The second column indicates the percentage of products that displayed each characteristic. The third column indicates the percentage of products with at least one characteristic in each category. For example, 60.9% of the products exhibited at least one characteristic in the architecture category. Modied physical demands and modied energy ow were the most frequently displayed characteristics, with 48.7% and 41.6% of products surveyed, respectively. Similarly, their parent categories, user interactions and external interactions, were the most frequently cited categories, with 68.5% and 80.2% of products, respectively, exhibiting at least one characteristic in each category. In contrast, the percentage of products that granted the user an additional function was much lower at 38.1%. There are at least two potential explanations for the differences between categories. First, the results suggest that mechanical innovation may be more closely associated with a products external and user interactions than with additional functionality alone, at least from the customers perspective. The lower percentage of products with additional functions could also indicate that additional functions or functional shifts are more difcult to integrate into products. Finally, the external and user interaction categories are quite broad, as indicated by the number of characteristics associated with them. The breakdown in characteristics may also encourage the researcher to think more carefully about these categories and thereby identify more products that exhibit them. 021009-6 / Vol. 133, FEBRUARY 2011

Overall, neither the average number of characteristics per product nor the distribution of characteristics across categories differed substantially when compared across award lists or award list years. For example, the percentage of products with at least one characteristic in each category, as documented in Table 4, differed by less than 4% per category between the set of products in the 20032005 award lists and those in the 20062008 award lists. Also, the IDEA products were expected to display more user interaction characteristics than the other award lists based on IDSAs origins in industrial design, but this hypothesis proved not to be the case. Also, no statistically signicant differences were observed between products that appeared on multiple award lists and those that appeared on only one. These results indicate that the trends in innovation characteristics were consistent across the award lists and years investigated in this study. On average, award-winning products displayed multiple characteristics of innovation. The 197 products in the study averaged approximately three innovation characteristics per product. Approximately 75% of the products exhibited at least three innovation characteristics, and approximately 95% exhibited at least two. These results suggest that innovative products often exhibit multiple innovative advantages over comparative products. To further investigate these ndings, the authors compared a subset of the award-winning products to their competitors on the in-store shelves of major retailers, as described in Sec. 3.4. Specically, 14 products from the 2007 and 2008 award lists were found on the in-store shelves of major retail stores: Logitech MX air mouse, Vicks forehead thermometer, Polaroid PoGo Zink pocket printer, Eye Fi wireless SD. card, Yamaha YSP-series digital sound projector, GearWrench X-beam wrench, Chefn PalmPeeler, One Touch can opener, Stanley MaxLife TriPod ashlight, Belkin compact surge protector, Oliso Frisper, Cub Cadet ZForce zero turn riding mower, Oral-B Triumph Smart Series electric toothbrush, and the iPhone. Each product was compared with at least two non-award-winning products, with an average of approximately four non-award-winning comparison products per award-winning product. Of the 14 products investigated, all but 4 displayed more innovation characteristics than their competitors. As shown in Table 5, the award-winning products exhibited an average of 2.9 characteristics per product, compared with 0.5 characteristics per non-award-winning product. The difference was statistically signicant with a p-value of 0.00003, based on a t-test of the null hypothesis that the average numbers of characteristics were equal for the two groups. The award-winning products also exhibited a higher average number of characteristics in each innovation category. As shown in Table 5, the differences between award-winning and non-award-winning products were statistically signicant for all innovation categories at a p-value of 0.1. The architecture and external and user interaction categories Transactions of the ASME

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were statistically signicant for p-values of 0.05. Those three categories were also the most frequently exhibited categories in the larger parent study summarized in Table 4. The signicance of these differences between award-winning and non-award-winning products is remarkable for several reasons. First, it provides evidence that the innovation characteristics are more prevalent in award-winning products than in their nonaward-winning competitors. This trend suggests that innovators may be wise to focus on multiple characteristics, when attempting to design innovative products. Second, even though the awardwinning products had been available for two or more years in the marketplace, their competitors had not yet managed to replicate all of their innovative features. In some cases, such as the Vicks forehead thermometer, a low-cost competitor had already launched a competing product with identical features, such as color-coding and forehead readings. In most cases, however, the award-winning products distinguishing features were still unique on the retailers shelves. For example, the Cub Cadet Zero Turn Riding Mower was the only consumer riding lawn mower on its retailers shelves that offered a zero turn radius with a standard steering wheel, rather than a series of levers, resulting in innovation characteristics such as reduced physical and cognitive demands. Third, since each product was compared with an average of four non-award-winning products, there were ample opportunities for the non-award-winning products to exhibit distinguishing characteristics, but they did so with a much smaller frequency than the award-winning products. Often, the award-winning product or another competing product already embodied the nonaward-winning products advantageous features. For example, the Oliso Frisper was compared with three products on its retailers shelves: the Tilia Foodsaver Freshsaver handheld vacuum system, the Rival Seal-a-Meal, and the Tilia Foodsaver vacuum packaging system. Two of the competing products the Rival Seal-a-Meal and the Tilia Foodsaver vacuum packaging system advertised their hands-free, one-touch operation. Since both of those products and the Oliso Frisper offered that feature, none of the products earned a modied physical demand characteristics for that feature because they did not offer an advantage relative to their competitors. The remaining product the Tilia Foodsaver Freshsaver handheld vacuum system cited its handheld size as an advantage relative to the larger systems, but the Oliso Frisper offered that feature as well. However, all of the vacuum sealing products required proprietary bags, except the Oliso Frisper, which utilized standard Ziploc bags and earned modied cost and interacting with infrastructure characteristics for that feature.

Closure

An empirical study was conducted of 197 consumer products that received innovation awards from Time, Popular Science, and the Industrial Design Society of America between 2003 and 2008. Based on their award citations, the products were analyzed with respect to several innovation criteria in the categories of architecture, external interactions, user interactions, functionality, and cost. One of the interesting ndings of the study was the frequency with which different types of innovations were exhibited. Of the products analyzed in the study, 68.5% and 80.2% exhibited enhanced user and external interactions, respectively, compared with 38.1% with additional functions and 60.9% with innovative architectures. Furthermore, when the innovation categories were partitioned into more specic characteristics e.g., the user interactions category was partitioned into three characteristics: modied physical demands, modied sensory demands, and modied cognitive demands, the average product exhibited approximately three characteristics. Of the 197 award-winning products, approximately 75% exhibited at least three different characteristics of innovation and 95% exhibited at least two. These results were reinforced by an in-store empirical study in which a subset of the award-winning products was compared with competing products Journal of Mechanical Design

on the shelves of major retailers. On average, those awardwinning products exhibited 2.9 characteristics per product, a statistically signicant increase over the 0.5 characteristics exhibited, on average, by their competitors. The award-winning products also exhibited enhanced architecture and external and user interactions at a signicantly greater rate than their competitors. These ndings stress the need for engineering design methodologies that focus on improving product interactions. Tools are available for considering function, architecture, and external interactions during the design process. These tools include an abundance of recent research on functional modeling, product architecture, and green design. While more research and industrial applications are certainly needed in those areas, there appears to be a signicant gap between current design methodology and the need to incorporate innovative user interaction features as part of many successful products. There are several emerging engineering design techniques that focus on customer interactions with a product, as a source of innovations. For example, von Hippel and co-workers 17,60,61 conducted customer interviews with lead userscustomers who push a product to its limits experience needs prior to the general population, and benet signicantly from having those needs fullled. In related work, the authors have developed techniques for helping ordinary customers serve as lead users by interacting with a product under extreme conditions 62,63. Other techniques, such as empathic design 64, articulated use 39, bodystorming 65, and contextual needs analysis 66, are also aimed at helping designers better understand, or even experience, how customers interact with products. For example, Ford engineers developed a simulation suit with goggles, ear plugs, thick gloves, and arm and leg weights and motion restrictors to help their young engineers understand the challenges faced by older drivers 67. These principles have also been reected in universal design studies that encourage designers to target broader sections of the population 68,69. Based on the results of this study, as well as literature that suggests a design shift toward a products interactions 70, it appears that these types of techniques may become increasingly important. Cagan and Vogel 71, for example, introduced an integrated new product development approach that focuses specically on user-centered design. In addition to the broad research opportunities motivated by this study, there are several opportunities for expanding and rening the study itself. First, it could be helpful to further decompose some of the innovation characteristics to differentiate, for example, between changes in type and changes in magnitude of energy, material, and information ows. It could also be helpful to expand the list of characteristics to capture aspects of product value that are broader than innovation, which was the focus of this study. For example, Cagan and Vogel 71 dened a set of attributes that contribute to the overall value of a product, some of which overlap with the innovation characteristics dened in this study. For example, ergonomics and impacts, as dened by Cagan and Vogel 71, are reected in the user interaction and external interaction characteristics dened in this study. Other attributes, such as quality, clearly contribute to the long-term value of a product, but they are not included in the innovation characteristics because they were not highlighted in the innovation award citations from which they were derived. It would also be interesting to compare the results of this study with a series of customer interviews probing the reasons for purchasing an innovative product over the competition. Specically, it would be informative to poll representative customers for their opinions on the characteristics of innovative products and to compare the results to the characteristics compiled by the authors. In addition, it could be very revealing to investigate the designers and design processes behind award-winning products and specically to research the factors that drove the product designers to incorporate specic characteristics in their designs. It would also be interesting to quantitatively track the market success of the FEBRUARY 2011, Vol. 133 / 021009-7

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award-winning products in this study, relative to non-awardwinning products, and to link that success to various characteristics of the market, rm, and product itself. Finally, the innovation characteristics developed in this study could be adapted as evaluation tools for analyzing the results of innovation studies. The comparison of award-winning and nonaward-winning products provides evidence that some of the innovation characteristics are more prevalent in award-winning products. Accordingly, those characteristics should be useful as tools for predicting whether a product has the potential for innovative success.

Acknowledgment
The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Kristin L. Wood of The University of Texas at Austin for helpful comments on a draft of this paper. The authors would also like to acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CMMI0825461/0825713. Any opinions, ndings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reect the view of the sponsors.

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