Improving functionality, costs, service, manufacturing methods. Facilitating variation in product range and usage. Giving products an identity. Just some examples of how design plays a role in increasing product quality and competitiveness. And these same issues are central to the process of creating new products.

The increasing sophistication and diversification of supply and demand call for an ever-more acute understanding of markets and users.

Computer tools now speed up and facilitate innovation, yet product design has become a highly complex, strategic process, encompassing functional, technical, aesthetic, economic and the sensitive aspects of a product. At the same time, it must take into account not only the company culture, but also any constraints and standards relating to safety or the environment.
To be able to analyse, integrate and formalise all these factors in a coherent way, a designer has to interact, throughout the innovation process, with everyone involved on a project, within the company or outside, upstream or downstream of the product creation process.

This definition has been taken from Agency for the Promotion of Industrial Creation APCI