Design supporting interdisciplinary environments -a user-centred biomedical product innovation project-

The Oslo region has a wealth of expertise in medical and technical research, generating an abundance of medically related technological inventions. Despite this, the region has not been especially successful in applying this expertise to the creation of p roduct innovations. The D-side strategy for dealing with this challenge is to invoke the goal of interdisciplinary product design as a meeting point for a diversity of different stakeholders. This particular project will primarily concern collaboration in the early towards the mid phases of innovation, when creativity and conceptualization - i.e. idea generation - still is paramount and by that merely aspiring to smoothing the progress of the later phases of innovation implementation, commercialization an d business model innovation. The project brings together competencies in productification, technology and business by letting; (i) product design expertise from the Institute of Industrial Design (IDE) at AHO; interact with (ii) two medical and technolog ical research networks; the R&D network Interventional Centre and the commercialization agent Medinnova and finally; (iii) with two-three biomedical companies in need of both productification and more appropriate product development processes. Furthermore , the project also involves additional expertise within group dynamics and facilitation of innovative product development processes. This kind of diversity of knowledge and skills is usually identified as a powerful predictor of innovation; however adeq uate team process competencies are still needed to enable the fruits of this diversity to be harvested. The D-side strategy for achieving this is to utilize designerly methods of modeling physical product concepts in combination with a novel Rapid Prototy ping. The expected outcomes are primarily; (i) innovative product concepts (ii) praxis for developing such innovations and (iii) a network of appropriate stakeholders for developing it in the region of Oslo.