Ice Scraper Product Family Development at Innovation Factory

Many companies have developed product families based on common platforms with varying degrees of success. Many studies of these platforms are based on product dissection. It can be challenging to gain complete information from the companies about the product development for a number of reasons including intellectual property protection. Also, many new products are developed by teams, making it difficult to get the complete picture from any individual. The case study in this chapter comes from a small company of only two primary people, so it was possible to gain insight about the complete process. Of particular interest is that the company started their design with full intent of using platform strategies for developing their product family. The following is a description of their top-down approach to platform-based product development.