A TRIZ-based Approach to Generation of Service-supporting Product Concepts

Recently, business environment and customer needs have become rapidly changing, hence it is very diff icult to fulfill sophisticated customer needs by product or service innovation only. In practice, to cope with this problem, various manufa cturing companies have developed services to combine with their produ cts. Along with this, many academic studies on PSS (Product Service Syst m) which is the integrated system of products and services have been conducted from the viewpoint of manufacturers. On the other h and, service providers are also attempting to develop service-su pporting products to increase their service competitiveness and provi de differentiated value. However, there is a lack of research based o n the service-centric point of view. Accordingly, this paper proposes a c oncept generation method for service-supporting product development f rom the service-centric point of view. This method is desig ned to be executed in five consecutive steps: situation analysis, prob lem definition, problem resolution, solution evaluation, and concep t generation. In the proposed approach, some tools of TRIZ (Theory o f S lving Inventive Problem) such as ISQ (Innovative Situatio n Questionnaire) and 40 inventive principles are employed in order t o define problems of the current services and solve them by generatin g service-supporting product concepts. This research contributes to the development of service-supporting products and serv ic -centric PSSs. Keywords—TRIZ, PSS (Product Service System), service-supporting product, concept generation