Emotion-Driven Innovation: critical review and a proposal

The purpose of this paper is to present a critical review of tools aimed at supporting the creation of new products with a convincing emotional value. According to a large body of literature, the innovation process can be divided in two main parts: the front end of innovation (FEI), focused on producing new product ideas (opportunity generation process) and the back end of innovation (BEI), aimed at transforming the idea in a product (product development process). We articulate the FEI in three main stages and define the peculiar characteristics they should possess in order to generate emotion-rich product ideas; the outcome is a general model of emotion-driven FEI (e-FEI). The three stages of e-FEI are: 1) Knowledge Acquisition: the identification of meaningful emotions to be evoked by the product in Human-Product interactions; 2) Goal Definition: the establishment of the emotional intentions of the new product; 3) Idea Generation: the transformation of the emotional intentions in novel product ideas. We also propose a categorization of Human-Product Interactions that should be taken into account in emotion-driven FEI (e-FEI) model, which are: symbolic (possessing the product); behavioural (using the product); aesthetic (sensing the product); social (connecting with the community that possess the same product). The three-stage e-FEI model was used to organize and analyse the literature on emotionfocused design and innovation tools. Based on this approach the main results are: a) it is not easy to find tools having a well-defined set of emotions; b) it is evident the absence of tools focussing on the definition of the emotional intentions of the new product; c) we discover that there are few idea generation tools stimulating emotion-rich product ideas. Supported by the results of literature review it is presented a proposal of a new methodology based on the three-stage e-FEI model and the four categories of human-product interactions.