Supporting need seeker innovation: the Radical Innovation Design methodology.

Summary Driven by a utilitarian perspective, the question of useful innovation and creating essential values is set. Such innovation should lead to cover or alleviate significant pains which are not satisfactorily covered by existing solutions. Radical Innovation Design (RID) is a structured methodology for exploring the front end of useful innovation in need seeker mode. In this paper, the fundaments of RID are presented for the first time and illustrated on the search for radical innovations for a handitennis wheelchair of a champion. The most original part of RID stands in the problem setting stage which starts with re-expressing the ideal need to set the issue playground-for usefully thinking in the box-in which two worlds are populated: the world of problems or pain points and the world of usage scenarios. The determination of value buckets has been automated by matrix representations of dependencies between problems, usage scenarios and existing solutions. A subset of opportunistic value buckets are further addressed in the problem solving stage for focused ideation, to ensure performing " blue ocean " innovations, i.e. in not yet explored usage and problem situations.