We were very pleased to accept the authors' request to focus on the key prospects opened up by this book. Renault, which has a fruitful research partnership with the Ecole des Mines de Paris (CGS), was directly involved in the issues covered here.

For Renault, this research has already encouraged us to set up an Innovation Centre and to develop experimental innovative design tools; today it helps build more effective ‘front-end’ functions for the firm, in terms of innovation capability and value creation. We were also very pleased to find that the experience provided by Renault for this research contributed to the results described in this book. The research partnership was even the subject of a joint communication by Renault and the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 2005, by special invitation from the Annual Conference of the European Academy of Management.

The distinction between innovative design and rule-based design is doubtless the latest idea and the one which will have the most impact on the way design systems operate in the future. It helps build innovative design teams more effectively. They will, of course, be composed of designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, partner suppliers, etc. But above all, these teams will have a wider scope for exploration and research, whilst also being better organized and more involved in our sales projects. The major contribution of the C-K design theory developed by the Ecole des Mines is doubtless to reconcile these two notions.

RICHARD TREVITHICK (1771–1833)

Throughout his life, the mechanical engineer Richard Trevithick was dogged by misfortune and never achieved worldly success, He was born at Pool in the parish of Illogan, Cornwall on 13 April 1771; he had four sisters, but no brothers. His father held the responsible position of manager at the important Dulcoath mine. While he was still a baby, the family moved to Penponds, just outside Camborne, where he went to school and learned the three R's. He grew up into an immensely strong young man, capable of lifting heavier weights than anyone else around. While still quite young he was appointed engineer, responsible for erecting and servicing the steam engines that pumped out water from the pits. In those days, the alternative to the Newcomen engine was the one supplied by the firm of Boulton and Watt.

In 1797, Trevithick's father died and his 26-year-old son became sufficiently well-off to marry. His bride was Jane Harvey, daughter of a local businessman. A woman of strong character who spared him domestic worries, she stood by him through thick and thin, despite the fact that with him work took precedence over family life. Trevithick was convinced of the need to increase the efficiency of steam engines to cope with the increasing depth of the pits but, like many others, was held back by Watt's master patent, covering every conceivable innovation, and Watt was opposed to the use of steam at much more than atmospheric pressure.

FERDINAND BRAUN (1850–1918)

Germany enjoyed a period of exceptional prosperity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The country overtook France in many ways, and engineering was one of these. Electrical engineering was a German speciality. Ferdinand Braun was born on 6 June 1850 at Fulda, a Catholic enclave in a Protestant region not far from Frankfurt. His father was a minor civil servant, who married the daughter of his superior. Ferdinand, their youngest son, had, altogether, four brothers and two sisters. After leaving the local gymnasium, Braun began studying physics at the minor University of Marburg but he soon moved to Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1872. Like Heinrich Hertz later on, he became a protégé of Helmholtz. Two years later, as a young gymnasium instructor in Leipzig, he wrote his first book Der Junger Mathematiker und Naturforscher. He then progressed up the academic ladder, being außerordentliche professor first in Marburg and then in Strasbourg, then ordentliche professor first in Tübingen and then back to Strasbourg, where he remained for almost the whole of the rest of his career, during which time the city was in German hands.

Braun was the first to investigate the rectifier effect in semiconductor crystals, the phenomenon behind most solid-state electronics. In 1897, he invented, but refused to patent, the cathode ray oscilloscope, which became the basis for the television tube, computer terminals and many other electronic devices.