Development of collaborative product design systems

New product development is a complex activity that is carried out by internal design team as well as with the contributions of external actors, such as users. In order to guide the design activities both internal and external of the boundaries of the company, structured methods or tools can be used. One of their main goals should be favoring and fostering the collaboration among the subjects that take part in the design process. Thus it is possible to generate more innovative and creative product concepts, that respect the actual users’ needs. The goal of this thesis is to present new structured and formal methods for the design of new products based on functional analysis. The proposed methodologies take into account several factors which determine the success and innovativeness of the product, such as functions, performance, failure or user perception. They allow, for example, to guide a functional benchmarking, to stimulate designers’ creativity or understand which are the promising products, considering the analysis of their reliability. Although such methodologies maintain the benefits of the other existing ones, they also profit from the intuitiveness of the functional analysis, thanks to the ease of learning them. In parallel, regarding the collaborative design between internal designers and external actors, this thesis comprises an in-depth analysis of the use of crowdsourcing for new product development activities. In particular, it examines the ways of improving a real crowdsourcing platform called LILIT in order to promote the collaboration between the company and external actors