Improving the ethical dimension in the innovation process–Proposal for an ethical engineering design method

Abstract

Large companies' engineering design process rarely considers the ethical and moral dimensions of innovation projects. This need for ethics is increasingly felt, particularly with the advent of digital technologies. Our research mainly focuses on product designers in large companies during the innovation/creativity phase. We propose and evaluate the efficiency of a method allowing them to consider ethics from this first stage of product development. A specific database incorporating ethical categories and problems from the early stages of idea generation supports this study. This database is inspired by a research project funded by the European Commission called ETICA. We evaluate our proposal with a detailed case study in a large automotive company. This case study highlights the contribution of our extended ethical design method from an ethical point of view and a financial one for the company. We believe that our proposal will boost creativity by addressing innovative product designers' usual fixations.