Track: Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Abstract

It is essential to develop products that are successful in future markets. However, product engineering often takes several years or even longer, and anticipating the needs and requirements for products is necessary. Strategic foresight provides a solution for identifying future product needs and requirements as well as product properties. Given the constantly changing environment, it is necessary to continually adapt the results of strategic foresight. Changes can be identified through shifting forecasts and trends. To ensure the success of the product in development, changes in the environment must be continuously integrated into the product engineering process (PEP). Thus, the relationship between monitoring changes in the future through foresight approaches and in the product during the PEP is important. This paper aims to analyze the integration of monitoring into the product engineering process based on elements of strategic foresight. The main objective was to identify whether existing approaches support this integration, by conducting a systematic literature review analyzing 1,664 research results. Here, no suitable approaches were identified in the literature. Therefore, to enable the integration of such approaches into the PEP, existing foresight approaches were examined to determine the extent to which monitoring approaches can be linked to them. During the examination of existing foresight approaches, especially scenario methods, commonalities were identified. Although these run individually, they generate the same results, such as influencing and key factors. These commonalities can be used as starting points for monitoring. To define these starting points, general monitoring approaches were examined to compare their structure and process. Here, different processes and structures of the approaches were identified, making it challenging to derive uniform elements for linking to foresight approaches in PEP. The central finding of this research work is that a design support must be defined to enable linkage and integration into the PEP. Initial preliminary work is suitable, in which product properties are derived from the scenarios themselves, as well as key factors. A link between product properties, scenarios, and key factors exists, which can be used for the operationalization of monitoring but has not yet been defined. In summary, different approaches to monitoring exist, but they have different procedures and structures, making integration into the PEP challenging. However, the uniformity of the scenario processes provides a good starting point for developing support for the monitoring of environments, which can help derive the impact on product properties in the event of changes. This enables the PEP to react to changes in the future and develop products that are robust for the future.