Collaborative Design Aspects in the European Global Product Realization Project*

The European Global Product Realization (E-GPR) project represents the main practical part of the E-GPR course organized by 3 European universities: the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, the Technical University of Delft and the University of Ljubljana. It is defined in collaboration with the industrial partner(s) of the E-GPR course and consists of developing a global product that can be sold in Europe and other markets. The project provides the teams of participating students with an opportunity to put into practice the knowledge learned throughout the E-GPR course and during other related courses undertaken at their universities. In this paper we investigate how the collaborative design aspects are incorporated in the E-GPR project. There are two main activities in collaborative design to focus on: (i) concepts generation and (ii) concept selection. We noted that in the E-GPR project the concepts generation activity is well structured and organized to some extent whereas the concept selection activity is dealt with in an informal way. We show that in the concepts generation activity of the E-GPR project the students experiment with almost all the collaborative design aspects they have learnt during the E-GPR lectures. The concept selection activity is dealt with in an informal way whereas it is known that inefficient decisions during the concept selection activity can seriously affect the next stages of the product development. That is why we describe a group decision-making framework that allows structuring and formalizing the concept selection activity in order to improve its efficiency.