Available online at www.sciencedirect.com 2212-8271 © 2014 Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the International Scientific Committee of “The 6th CIRP Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems” in the person of the Conference Chair Professor Hoda ElMaraghy” doi:10.1016/j.procir.2014.01.016 Procedia CIRP 16 (2014) 128 – 133 ScienceDirect Product Services Systems and Value Creation. Proceedings of the 6th CIRP Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems "Design for Mobility – A Customer Value Creation Approach" Tarek AlGeddawy a,* , Mohamed Abbas b , Hoda ElMaraghy b a Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN, 55812,USA b Intillegent Manufacturing Systems Center, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, N9B 1K3 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-218-726-6810; fax: +1-218-726-8596. E-mail address:geddawy@d.umn.edu Abstract It is a global trend nowadays for manufacturing and service firms to create and increase customer value either during initial design of a product/service or by modifying their existing products/service. When a product already exists, customer value can be increased by adding new qualities/features to a traditional product that would add much needed services while keeping price competitive. Qualities, such as foldability and mobility when product is not in use, are examples of creating and improving customer value. This paper presents a design model that helps designers incorporate foldability, mobility and personalization in a regular product design. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the International Scientific Committee of “The 6th CIRP Conference on Industrial Product- Service Systems” in the person of the Conference Chair Professor Hoda ElMaraghy. “Keywords: Design for Mobility; Value Creation; Foldability; Ease of Folding; Cladistics” 1. Motivation Value creation in products is created in many ways. ElMaraghy H. and ElMaraghy W. [1] showed that creating product variants by introducing new qualities and services can enhance customer satisfaction. They also introduced the different strategies used in order to manage variety, starting from product design up to the manufacturing phase. As an example, the Telecommunication industry has evolved over the past two decades with the introduction of cell phones. [2]. Fig. 1 illustrates how the phone as a product survived by introducing a series of added upgrades, qualities and services. Services like cellular networks and data services accompanied the introduction of qualities like handheld mobility, touch screens and smartphone capabilities in telephones. Landlines used to be the common method of communication; now cell phone users exceed the number of landline users by eight or nine to one [3]. One of the main reasons for this tremendous increase in the number of users is that customers perceived mobility as a main feature of the value proposition of mobile commerce [2]. Furthermore, the innovation of the touch screen as a new quality preserved the phone success trend and increased its value to customers as a micro-computer, calendar, media player, gaming station, etc. [4]. The ultimate advantage of the introduction of handheld mobility to phones was the personalization of phones, while making them indispensable for millions of customers. Decreasing the dimensions of products is a main enabler for better product mobility. In the case of the telephone, the dimensions of the product itself became smaller due to technology advancement in electronics. However, folding the product, when not in use, can also lead to better mobility, introducing personalization as a new service to ordinary large volume immobile products (Fig. 2).In this case, value creation is increased through better qualities (foldability and mobility), better services (personalization), and better price through reduction of transportation, handling as well as storage costs [5][6]. This paper presents a design model that helps designers incorporate foldability, mobility and personalization in common designs. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the International Scientific Committee of “The 6th CIRP Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems” in the person of the Conference Chair Professor Hoda ElMaraghy”