A MEASURE FOR ASSESSING PRODUCT NOVELTY

New products have to be introduced in to the market at regular intervals of time, in order to maintain regularity in sales and profits. In this paper, we propose a measure for assessing novelty of new products. The basic ideas on which the measure is based are 1) novelty of a product could not be assessed without assessing its similarity or difference with existing products as reference. 2) There are several levels of novelty, based on how different a product is in its principle, technology and implementation from the existing products. Validity of the measure has been tested using an in-house experiment in which designers were asked to evaluate novelty of a set of products with respect to a given, existing product as reference.