Diss. Luleå : Luleå University of Technology, 2016

As a result of the deregulation of the Swedish railway market, the different functions involved during the life cycle of railway products have been spread out over different actors. The trigger for the work presented in this thesis was the insight that, since function-specific knowledge of the railway in Sweden belongs to different organizations, special efforts would be needed to achieve a holistic picture of a railway product during the conceptual design phase. However, there is a lack of methods developed for groups with participants from different organizations possessing different functional knowledge about a product. The overall aim of the research for this thesis was therefore to develop an ideation method and a concept selection method specifically for groups acting in the context of the Swedish deregulated railway market, with members from different organizations with different functional knowledge. By means of action design research, the methods were developed within the scope of a research project involving four different actors on the Swedish railway market. The project group tested Method 635, the gallery method and the SIL method. Overall, the gallery method was most popular and the SIL method least popular among the participants. Method 635 was found to have a considerably higher idea and concept generation rate than the gallery and SIL methods. The developed ideation method combines the rotational viewing of generated ideas in the group and gallery viewing with steps of verbal interaction where the group members take turns to present and comment on generated ideas. The project group regarded the developed method as the best method of all the methods which they had tried, and it outperformed the other methods with regard to the total number of generated concepts and ideas. The views of the project group on the method correlated positively to the views of participants taking part in field tests of the method. The developed concept selection method combines refined versions of the procedures for topic clarification, goal specification, requirement specification and concept screening developed by Pahl and Beitz with a concept scoring procedure based on the life cycle and societal costs associated with each concept that fulfils the stated requirements. The most important effect of the composition of the group was found to be the wide range of viewpoints on the topic at hand that the representative group of different relevant actors was able to provide.