FEATURE: New Product Development Using Feature-Drift Based Framework for Unique Aspect Recommendation

In today's highly competitive markets, the challenge for product manufacturers is not only to improve a product's performance by evolving its current features but also to provide out-of-the-box product designs and characteristics. This paper proposes the FEATURE framework, which recommends product manufacturers with the unique features to be added to the next generation of a product by examining features of (a) related products, (b) competitors' products and (c) product's predecessors. FEATURE differs from existing approaches as it introduces and uses the concept of feature drift to suggest the unique and out-of-the-box features from related products apart from just improving the current features. The recommended features' popularity is investigated using social media and depending on the designer's decision criteria on innovativeness or viability, the features are ranked. The uniqueness of FEATURE is that it can help designers by providing a broader range of ideas to develop novel products.