How design theories enable the design of generic technologies: Notion of generic concept and genericity improvement

Abstract

International audienceGeneric technologies enable to create benefits across wide range of industrial applications. Though providing important insights on generic technologies commercialization, less attention was paid to generic technologies creation. Then, is it possible to design directly generic technologies? Can the intention to build genericity be expressed ex ante? The proposed study indicates that formal design theories provide powerful mechanism of genericity construction when the environments are initially fixed and partially unknown. It is demonstrated that starting point to design generic technology is a generic concept. In addition to a concept definition proposed by C-K theory, the descriptors associated to the domain of existence were added. The generic concept targets the existence domains that are not reduced to one solution but several of them both known or partially unknown. Moreover, it is highlighted that different descriptors of existence domain can lead to various genericity levels. The economic reasoning behind the genericity building provides insights on the dynamics of engineering systems