A triz based method for making systematic innovation in Eco-Design

Today innovation has to meet the environmental aspects. The ever increasing scarcity of resources and the higher level of pollution are orienting consumers and therefore industries towards a cleaner production and green products. Within a time to market which is constantly reducing, companies need tools to quickly develop new products which provide customer and business value together with a lower environmental impacts. In this paper, we propose a method to support innovation projects, taking into account also environmental requirements. The specific goal is to drive systematically the designer towards more sustainable products or processes, without interfering with its traditional design approach. The method is based on an integration of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools for collecting and processing information from all life cycle phases of the product, with a reworking of the TRIZ fundamentals (as the Ideal Final Results, Laws of Technical Systems Evolution and resources) for identifying where and how to intervene on it. An application case is used to show the potentiality of the presented method.