A New Process for Creating Design Briefs to Improve Design Innovations in Home Health Care

Many companies are exploring opportunities for improving Home Health Care (HHC) provision, at a time when the demand for well-designed home healthcare products (HHCPs) and associated services is rapidly growing. Research into their approaches found that innovation strategies and techniques adopted by many HHCP suppliers have not matured to realise the best innovative solutions.

This practice-based PhD thesis presents the research journey which investigated the strengths and weaknesses of product innovation approaches of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) which dominate the HHC field. It considers how to improve HHC product innovation by using more robust New Product Development (NPD) processes that aim at enabling more effective team working; improving information management; and establishing a better understanding the needs of all stakeholders, particularly end-users, in the design and development process.

Working collaboratively with companies in the sector innovation shortcomings are identified at the fuzzy front-end (FFE) of a project cycle. The majority of these issues are related to poor practices in creating and applying the design brief. The study found that few SMEs engage in structured approaches to the development of the HHCP brief, which leads to numerous (often very costly) design modifications as the product life develops.

As a solution an original toolkit for improving the design brief development process is presented. It is focussed on managing innovation within the FFE of NPD. It takes the form of a new and novel online web service that guides and supports SMEs in writing a multi-stakeholder design brief.

For a limited period of 18 months (Oct 2014 - March 2016), the reader can also choose to review the toolkit online: http://designbriefingtoolkitv2.businesscatalyst.com/

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