Performance of the Problem Solving Process in Design: Measure and Impact Factors

This article focuses on the problem solving process in design. Today, enterprises face an important need of innovation, as they have to regularly propose new products or new services. Design is one of the key activities of enterprises to be innovative, but it is also one of the more difficult activities to manage and especially to appreciate its performance. There exists many tools to evaluate and manage performance in a variety of fields, but the design process is quite poor on this topic. Few tools are proposed to evaluate and manage the performance of the design activity. Some parts of this activity are more or less manageable, but one remains hardly controllable: the problem solving process. Two parts will be proposed in the article, a first one will propose a set of definitions: definition of the performance, of the enterprise organization, of the design activity and of the role of problem solving in this activity. A second one will focus on the ways to measure and manage the performance of problem solving in design by the proposal of criteria to evaluate it and by the proposal of a set of indicators that impact this performance.