ABSTRACT
Product development is best performed by an interdisciplinary team with representatives from different segments of an industrial enterprise because in addition to satisfying the technical requirements, a successful product should also be esthetically pleasing, safe to use, economically competitive, and compliant with legal and environmental constraints. The activities involved in product development include seeking consumer views and translating them into technical requirements, developing concepts and performing feasibility study, performing system-level design, developing detail design and selecting materials and processes, testing and refining a prototype, launching the product, and selling the product. The house of quality (HOQ) approach makes it easier to correlate customer needs with product technical characteristics. This chapter also discusses the market cycle of a product starting with the introduction stage, growth, maturity, and finally decline. As it is no longer acceptable that engineering materials are used and then discarded in landfills, it is important to recycle materials, which needs an infrastructure for sorting and scrap processing.
