Value-added product design with design of experiments

The care and feeding of product designers has always been a significant challenge for managers. The design function includes both routine and creative elements, and their relative proportions vary from one product to another. For mature products, routine tasks such as selecting components from catalogs and calculating parameters with known equations is a major part of design. For emerging products, the creative portion plays a larger part. As a class of products matures, its designs become more standardized and the design tasks more routine.