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Existing Product Analysis

Traditional 'existing product analysis' often involves selecting a few successful products already in the market and analysing those in detail. This frequently becomes a fairly descriptive exercise with limited new learning. Using a morphological matrix, designers first identify key features that would make a product successful. They then find how different products already in the market provide those features. This leads designers to consider a wider range of products (or even similar products from different domains). The explicit choice of specific features in advance also leads to focused analysis rather than description.

Ideation Tool

As an ideation tool, designers would again identify key features their product would need to have, but now come up with different ideas for those features themselves. Only at the end of the process possible feature combinations are considered. This 'bottom-up' approach leads to considering a wide range of options as the restriction of the bigger picture is initially removed. The explicit choice of specific features in advance again leads to focus. At the same time, a huge number of possible combinations of features is generated.

Consider the morphological matrix for bread in the image above: 24 feature options are identified, leading to more than 4000 (4^6) possible combinations if only one of each feature row is chosen. And more than 16 million (16^6) if more than one feature option per row could be selected.