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This study addresses the problem of the slow take-up of ecodesign in industry by identifying and categorising the implementation challenges faced by practitioners. Case studies from nine manufacturing companies from five different countries are reported based on interviews with key ecodesign personnel. A literature-derived framework is used to analyse each case, allowing for robust cross-case analysis. Challenges are identified in five areas: strategy, tools, collaboration, management and knowledge. The management category of challenges is the most frequently mentioned by the companies sampled. The tools category is not as prominent as might have been expected given the on-going focus on tool development within this field. The main contributions of the study are the updating of the main challenges for ecodesign implementation faced by industry, and the development of a rich framework of challenges, including new challenges not previously mentioned in the literature. It is suggested that the framework can be used (and evolved) by other ecodesign researchers when developing surveys or questions for indepth case study interviews as this will facilitate more robust comparisons between studies and support the development of a more consolidated body of knowledge in this field.

Creative idea generation is essential to novel concept development and ultimately innovation. The following paper describes an extensive industry-based study investigating the use of creative stimuli during a brainstorming session at the conceptual stages of design. A new approach to retrieving creative stimuli referred to as 'Sweeper' is proposed, which sources stimuli internal to a company's information repository. This creative stimuli tool is then compared to other creative stimuli tools using objective, industrially grounded performance criteria. This study provides an arguably much needed real, industrially-based experiment regarding brainstorming. The results and observations suggest that having a guided approach to sourcing creative stimuli is very beneficial. The use of the TRIZ contradiction matrix and inventive principles is also shown to be a good example of a guided approach in terms of increasing creative performance. However, the Sweeper tool using internally sourced stimuli provides a method that is useful and more a practical alternative, as it is based firmly in the domain of activity.

Distributed teams are an increasingly common feature of engineering design work. One key factor in the success of these teams is the development of short- and longer-term shared understanding. A lack of shared understanding has been recognized as a significant challenge, particularly in the context of globally distributed engineering activities. A major antecedent for shared understanding is question asking and feedback. Building on question-asking theory this work uses a quasi-experimental study to test the impact of questioning support on homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. The results show significant improvement in shared understanding for both team types (27% improvement for heterogeneous and 16% for homogeneous), as well as substantial differences in how this improvement is perceived. This extends theoretical insight on the development of shared understanding and contributes one of few empirical studies directly comparing homogeneous and heterogeneous teams in the engineering design context. This has implications for how distributed teams can be more effectively supported in practice, as well as how shared understanding can be facilitated in engineering design

Creative ideas are essential to original concept generation and ultimately innovation. But where and when do these vital creative ideas occur during product innovation and more importantly how can they be influenced? The following paper describes an industrially-based study of several innovation projects following the actual processes of professional designers. Some ideas from the early brainstorm can be traced all the way through to concepts that are selected at the company's stage gate. Those early ideas are marked as 'appropriate' which provides an objective evaluation of the influence of any prescribed creative stimuli being used during the brainstorm sessions in relation to the output of the innovation process. The results showed that the frequency of idea production remained roughly constant during the first 30 minutes but steadily reduced after this period.However, the number of 'appropriate' ideas decreased rapidly, where 75% of the appropriate ideas in the first 30minutes had been expressed after just 15minutes. By introducing various forms of stimuli to the groups, the frequency of idea generation was maintained and in many cases increased. The stimuli were also shown to help generate more appropriate ideas which were included within concepts proposed at the stage-gate.