Tough customers: good designs

Abstract

Good design and successful innovation have been shown repeatedly to be intimately linked to early and close consultations between design and representative customers. What has not been highlighted, and should be, is that the tougher and more demanding the customers are in their equirements, the better and more robust the designs will be, along with their probability of reinnovation and propensity for successful longterm commercial exploitation. To demonstrate this point the history of a number of innovations based on good (commercially successful) designs is examined in two rather diffent industrial sectors — aerospace and agricultural machinery.