Towards mass individualisation: innovation toolkit for multi-level optimisation of open platform architecture products (OPAP)

Abstract

Product design for Mass Individualisation (MI) is a new product design paradigm comprising an open hardware platform and multiple modules that are integrated with the platform. It gives freedom to end-users to integrate different modules into the platform as per their choice. To realise this approach and convert it into an industrial practice, this thesis identifies key changes in traditional product design and customisation approaches (Context, Ecosystem, Perspective, Vendor, Competition, Access), key components that need to be focused on (Design & Development, Manufacturing, Assembly, Sustainability) and technologies that need to be integrated (Data mining, AI, IoT, 3D printing, Simulation, Product realisation). The findings from an industrial questionnaire survey show that the end product from MI will be more creative and innovative with 76% of responses in agreement, and offers more individualised (more than 80% of responses in agreement) and technologically advanced products (54% of responses in agreement). Open platform architecture products (OPAP) are the key enablers for MI. A framework for the Innovation toolkit for the end-user is developed in the second phase of research. The toolkit uses a multi-level optimisation model to identify the optimal OPAP design configuration to satisfy the exact needs of end-users. The toolkit design has been approached in four different steps: Modelling of OPAP; Modelling of evaluation measures and evaluation indices with end-user preferences; Identification of the optimal module options for every configuration; Configuration optimisation. The toolkit has been applied to three product platforms to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the methodology. A case study on an OPAP smartwatch finds an optimised configuration with a better customer satisfaction index, 0.830, than the initial index of 0.764. These case studies show that the developed innovation toolkit can readily be applied to this type of product development to obtain an optimised and highly individualised end product.