Improving the Ethical Dimension in the Innovation Process

Abstract

Large companies' engineering design processes rarely consider the ethical and moral dimensions of innovation projects. This need for ethics is increasingly felt, particularly with the advent of digital technologies. The research mainly focuses on product designers in large companies during the innovation/creativity phase. The authors propose and evaluate the efficiency of a method allowing them to consider ethics from this first stage of product development. A specific database incorporating ethical categories and problems from the early stages of idea generation supports this study. This database is inspired by a research project funded by the European Commission called ETICA. The authors evaluate the proposal with a detailed case study in a large automotive company. This case study highlights the contribution of the extended ethical design method from an ethical point of view and a financial one for the company. They believe that the proposal will boost creativity by addressing innovative product designers' usual fixations.