We were very pleased to accept the authors' request to focus on the key prospects opened up by this book. Renault, which has a fruitful research partnership with the Ecole des Mines de Paris (CGS), was directly involved in the issues covered here.
For Renault, this research has already encouraged us to set up an Innovation Centre and to develop experimental innovative design tools; today it helps build more effective ‘front-end’ functions for the firm, in terms of innovation capability and value creation. We were also very pleased to find that the experience provided by Renault for this research contributed to the results described in this book. The research partnership was even the subject of a joint communication by Renault and the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 2005, by special invitation from the Annual Conference of the European Academy of Management.
The distinction between innovative design and rule-based design is doubtless the latest idea and the one which will have the most impact on the way design systems operate in the future. It helps build innovative design teams more effectively. They will, of course, be composed of designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, partner suppliers, etc. But above all, these teams will have a wider scope for exploration and research, whilst also being better organized and more involved in our sales projects. The major contribution of the C-K design theory developed by the Ecole des Mines is doubtless to reconcile these two notions.