Abstract:

In product development, computer-aided design is already established as an effective tool for the generation, modification, analysis, simulation, and evaluation of a product design. The computer can also be regarded as an organizational platform on which disciplines like design, engineering, production, sales, marketing, and market research can work together to achieve product success. Each discipline can use the data in a central computer database for its own purposes. Market research, for example, can use the data for concept testing purposes, for gathering consumer opinions about the new product design. This paper shows how concept testing can benefit from the application of computer- aided design in new product development. First, it is shown that computer-aided design is particularly effective for creating realistic concepts that show the provisional design of the new product. Second, computer-aided design is a flexible tool for varying among a design proposal, once the design proposal is described and stored in the computer database. An alternative concept testing approach is presented to fully utilize this flexibility of computer-aided design.