Incandescent Light Bulb: Product Design and Innovation

In this brief article, a strategy is introduced for meshing the technical advances with the fulfillment of customer needs during the development and design of new products. The concept of an innovation map is developed to connect material, process, and product technologies to the value proposition of the new products. By retracing the advances in developing incandescent light bulbs, the interplay between technical discovery and its commercialization into new products is shown. Although the design of the incandescent light bulb is presented in hindsight, this interplay is the key to the design of new products; however, unfortunately, in new product design, there are many alternatives to explore that may not be fruitful.