Product innovation based on the host gene and target gene recombination under the technological parasitism framework

Abstract

In the rapidly changeable market, product innovation is critical for enterprises to improve their product competitiveness. Product innovation can be described as an evolutionary process of technical systems where the relationship between technologies follows the evolution from parasitism to symbiosis in technological parasitism theory. The existing research on the technological parasitism theory mainly focuses on explaining and verifying the evolution law of product systems from parasitism to symbiosis in the product innovation process. However, these research activities are a post-hoc summary, which limits the guidance for enterprises to proactively realize the evolution of products from parasitism to symbiosis in an ex-ante perspective. For the development of innovative products in the engineering field, enterprises lack an effective ex-ante design method to proactively find the appropriate parasitic technology, and integrate it with the host technology for the product system evolving towards a symbiotic state. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a product innovation design process based on the recombination of host and target genes under the technological parasitism framework. Product scenario analysis is used to explore the potential function needs to determine the search direction of parasitic technologies. The min-complement distance measure method is introduced to identify the appropriate parasitic technology. Based on four recombination operations, the construction process of new product genome through the recombination of host and target genes is proposed. The concept of new product is formed through the transcription of the product genome. The final scheme is developed objectively by using the coefficient variation method and Dempster combination rule. The proposed method is applied in the ex-ante design of a Chinese medicine dispensing machine for its feasibility and effectiveness.