UNIVERSITAT POLITÉCNICA DE VALENCIA DEPARTAMENTO DE DIBUJO APLICACIÓN DEL MÉTODO DE ESCENARIOS PARA LA CONCEPTUALIZACIÓN CREATIVA DE PRODUCTOS INNOVADORES EN EL SECTOR ESPAÑOL DE BALDOSAS CERÁMICAS TESIS DOCTORAL Presentada por: D. Javier Colomer Ramos Dirigida por: Dr. D. Manuel Martínez Torán Valencia, Diciembre 2011 ABSTRACT In a company, design is an activity that comes about from strategic decision making. The strategy is, effectively, a sequence of choices which culminate in an objective that is orientated by an unpredictable argument, which, in turn, is determined by the environment that surrounds the company and within which the design project evolves. The environment influences and determines the line of argument for the start-up approach for any design project in a company. All design strategies can start off from the decision to launch a new product, with a clear objective: to compete favourably in an environment with which the company needs to interact in order to survive or grow. But on many occasions, the context within which the design project is developed is a changeable, uncertain and sometimes unpredictable one, just as the environment which surrounds it. Part of the uncertainty which the new overall context entails is due to the transformation which the consumer has experienced in the latest decades and their new viewpoint towards consumption. In effect, the growing tendency towards globalisation, the increase of consumer power and the continued evolution of the Information and Communication Technologies ICT, represent a series of factors that bring about an increase in uncertainty, with more agents acting as competitors and operating in a field that is becoming increasingly global and open. The key challenge is to build an understanding of the emerging environment and, from the identification of its variables, to adopt a different outlook towards the future with which to direct the creative conceptualisation process of innovative products. The aforesaid process is considered as a main issue on which the company strategy is coordinated. It is an essential issue which, at this moment in time, every industrial firm has to consider and resolve through the use of new analytical methods and the summarising of information, which has been updated and adapted to the global and changing nature of our current competitive framework. Our research work seeks to promote a method that is based on the identification of new creative hypotheses with a view to the future, setting out from market reflection, with the firm intention of being capable of understanding and explaining better, not only the different variables of the environment and their interactions, but also the future alternatives that can be derived from them, which are often omitted in other analyses based on a single perspective, devised from the extrapolation of past trends. The main objective of this methodology is to represent future alternatives (scenarios) from determined variables, which are useful as referents during the first stage of the design process (conceptualisation of innovative products). The development of our scenarios pursues a sequence of specific actions in order to carry out the identification of new ideas for products and services, in contrast with other methodologies which include other fields within the company strategy. Therefore, when we refer to the inclusion and use of one's own methods for market research as a tool to improve the design process in the company, we understand that it is concerned with one's own actions in market design. Market design is subjected to the taking of strategic decisions by company organisations which have a leaning and commitment towards investing in creativity and innovation and which have opted for methods or techniques based on market reflection. It is impossible to understand market design without the implanting of strategic initiatives, whether they be definitive or transitory, which are backed up with the use of market methods. As it is not possible to understand a company's formulation of a strategy based on market design if this does not integrate design as a base of corporate strategy either, they take advantage of it as a way of integral thinking in order to innovate. As far as we are concerned, the model that we have represented pursues the search of coherent images of future possibilities for developing concepts of products in a small or medium-sized company in the ceramic tile sector. Our objective has been to contribute a model of strategic thinking, which has been constructed on the base of scenario methodology. This is a methodology which enables the generating of ideas related to design, which establish some decision procedures during the creative conceptualisation stage of innovative products and which systematically examines the challenges and opportunities of a company in the Spanish ceramic sector leading up to the year 2020.