METODI DI DESIGN INNOVATIVI PER LA PICCOLA E MEDIA IMPRESA

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in the European economy, yet they face the dual challenge of rapid time-to-market and continuous innovation with limited resources and informal processes. Unlike large firms with specialist roles and formal procedures, SMEs often rely on multi-role employees and ad hoc informal practices, which can lead to unclear requirements, fragmented decisions, and poor traceability. This thesis develops a systematic design process tailored to SME realities by blending holistic requirements management, iterative design loops, decision checkpoints, and light documentation. The framework integrates short Agile-style cycles with clear Stage-Gate decision points and applies Systems Engineering principles for end-to-end requirements tracking. At each cycle’s end, a lightweight checkpoint records only essential decisions and their justifications, preserving traceability without heavy paperwork. A repeated validation-and-verification routine continuously checks requirements against customer feedback and technical criteria, helping teams catch misalignments early and reduce costly late-stage changes. Requirements are prioritized following a minimum-viable mindset, enabling SMEs to focus scarce resources on features most likely to deliver early market insight. The method also adopts a system-thinking view: product development is treated as the design of a socio-technical system rather than a sequence of separate tasks, making lifecycle impacts visible. Design methods by Ulrich, Ullman, Paul, Beitz, and Pugh guide need analysis, conceptual, embodiment, and detailed design choices, ensuring each phase uses proven methods and tools. The modular, tool-agnostic nature of the framework allows implementation on familiar platforms, spreadsheets, shared drives, and whiteboards, so teams can maintain low-effort documentation and scale the process as needed. Several pilot applications illustrate the design stages: the direct ink–writing printer head supported the first stage of need analysis; a floor-cleaning system exercised the first and second stages of conceptual design and evaluation; and a trail-running shoe illustrated the third stage of embodiment design before detailed design. Although full empirical validation remains pending, initial feedback from practitioner workshops and small-scale trials indicates potential benefits: shorter iteration times, clearer requirements, fewer late design changes, and better preservation of design rationale. To build robust evidence, the thesis proposes a verification and validation roadmap for real SME projects, measuring key indicators, cycle time, rework rate, cost, and risk, across multiple product efforts and gathering qualitative feedback from stakeholders. Initial trials suggest that this process can improve iteration speed, requirement clarity, and design traceability; future work will focus on exploring lightweight digital support, intelligent assistant, and validating the model across diverse SME sectors.