Utilizing a Novel Approach at the Fuzzy Front-End of New Product Development: A Case Study in a Flexible Fabric Supercapacitor

The fuzzy front-end plays a most crucial part in new product development (NPD), leading to the success of product development and product launch in the market. This study proposes a novel method, TTRI_MP, by combining Crawford and Di Benedetto's model and Cooper's model, to strengthen the management of the fuzzy front-end. The proposed method comprises four stages: market exploration and technology forecasting, idea generation and segmentation, portfolio analysis and technology roadmapping (TRM). In the first stage, SWOT was utilized to identify the key strategic areas, and the technology readiness level (TRL) was adopted to position the level of developed technologies. In the second stage, the business concepts were required to go through the viability test and customers, collaborators, competitors and company (4C). In the third stage, the Strategic Position Analysis (SPAN) and Financial Analysis (FAN) developed by IBM were employed in the portfolio analysis to screen out potential NPD projects. In the last stage, the selected NPD projects were linked with their functions and technologies in the TRM chart. The method was successfully implemented by a research team working on a flexible fabric supercapacitor at the Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI).