1. Chapter 7
Concept Selection

2. Concept Selection
How can the team choose the best concept given that the designs are still quite abstract?
How can a decision be made that the team can “live with”?

3. Concept Development Process

4. What is a Concept anyway?

5. What is a Concept anyway?

6. Iterative Process
Concept selection is an iterative process closely related to concept generation and testing.

7. All Teams Use Some Method For Choosing a Concept
The methods vary in their effectiveness and include the following:
External decision: Concepts turned over to the customer, client, or some external entity for selection.
Product champion: An influential team member chooses a concept based on personal preference.

8. All Teams Use Some Method For Choosing a Concept
Intuition: Explicit criteria or trade-offs are not used; concept just seems better.
Multivoting: Each team member votes for several concepts; concept with the most votes is selected.

9. All Teams Use Some Method For Choosing a Concept
Pros and cons: The team lists the strength and weaknesses of each concept and makes a choice based upon group opinion.
Prototype and test: The organization builds and tests prototypes of each concept, making a selection based upon test data.
Decision matrices: The team rates each concept against prespecified selection criteria, which may be weighed.

10. Overview of 2-Stage Concept Selection Methodology
The first stage is called concept screening
The second stage is called concept scoring
Both stages -- concept screening and concept scoring, follow a six step process which leads the team through the concept selection activity.

11. Six Step Concept Selection Process
Prepare the selection matrix
Rate the concepts
Rank the concepts
Combine and improve the concepts
Select one or more concepts
Reflect on the results and the process

12. Concept Screening
Concept screening is based on a method developed by the late Stuart Pugh in the 1980’s and is often called Pugh concept selection

13. Concept Screening Matrix

14. Concept Scoring
Concept scoring is used when increased resolution will better differentiate among competing concepts.
In this stage, the team weighs the relative importance of the selection criteria and focuses on more refined comparisons with respect to each criterion.

15. Rate The Concepts

16. Concept Scoring Matrix

17. Decompose the selection criteria – if necessary