Innovative Design Technology (IDT) relates to the designers of the factory and products of the future, designing the innovative, customisable, value-added products of the future, and the factory machines and systems required to produce them. It includes product knowledge management, computer-aided innovation, and advanced computer aided manufacture. It is here that critical concurrency through the product life-cycle, as well as across the extended enterprise, is achieved, with huge impact on time-to-market and product development cost. Two key issues are identified:

• Concurrency is implemented through the sophisticated virtual product concept. This provides a Virtual Collaborative Manufacturing environment containing total product knowledge about the whole product life-cycle. In that environment, a product can be designed and ‘virtually’ tested for marketability, performance, manufacturability, maintainability, etc. The environment integrates tools for ‘design for X’, or ‘computer-aided X’ (X: innovation, economic manufacture, assembly, recycling, etc). Such tools operate on-line, providing immediate feedback to the designer, where these drivers or constraints operate pro-actively, and automatically, to feed into the generation of new designs.
• Design complexity concerns both the design of complex products, machines, and systems, and complexity in the design process itself. This complexity necessitates an increasingly high level of computer assistance, such as the use of AI-based optimisation techniques. Examples include design optimisation techniques, life-cycle analysis and optimisation for design of manufacturing systems, design evaluation using fuzzy sets, and intelligent CAD.