Design Innovation Paradigm and Patterns of Family Cars

Abstract

Innovation plays an important role in product design development that would respond to the user’s needs. However, users’ perspective on innovation is influenced by the values that grow in a society. The changes in society values have influenced the users’ perspective towards the innovation of the car. This situation leads to gaps between how designers think about the innovation and what the users’ needs of the car innovation design are. Thus, this study intends to compare the differences between the designers and users’ perspective on the innovation of the Indonesian car industry. The study focused on the design of the four top-selling cars in Indonesia, namely: Toyota Innova, Toyota Avanza, Suzuki APV and Nissan Grand from the year 1998 to 2012.

The survey was conducted by distributing 303 questionnaires from June 10 to June 16, 2013 to a virtual community at saft7.com, one of Indonesia’s well known automotive websites. Then, questionnaires were distributed and interviews were conducted about the characteristics of product design innovation in several automotive industries, namely: Toyota, on December 1 and March 21, 2013; Daihatsu, on March 18, 2013, Suzuki on April 16, 2013; and Nissan, on May 1, 2013 and May 16, 2013. Furthermore, the data compiled from the industry and the public respondents were processed using the non-parametric Mann-Whitney test and Wilcoxon W. This nonparametric test was performed on two independent samples to determine similarities and differences in the values ??of certain variables between the two groups tested. The results show that the designers and users tend to perceive car innovation as being part of the incremental innovation category. The innovation gaps were found in the attributes of the orientation of innovation and the product’s platform. However, the slight difference indicates that users tend to look at the design innovation as a differentiator and a novelty marker for cars they would purchase.

Keywords: incremental innovation, radical innovation, design driven innovation, designer perception, user perception, family car, design innovation.