As an industrial point of view, product design activity answer to firmsdevelopment needs. This activity requires a lot of heterogeneous knowledge and skills, whichhave to converge towards a common goal: describe a product meeting the market needs.Consequently, there are many interactions between the firm, its market and the design activity.Therefore, a development project must take into account specifications and constraints of eachelement. The goal of this PhD is to define a generic methodological framework allowing to builtand control a product design project depending on the firm development goals and its ownresources. For this, it is important to include many technical factors (such innovation, multitechnologicalproducts and numerical data specificities) but also economical and financialfactors (as the difficult competitive environment or limited financial resources). All theseheterogeneous parameters involve a global approach of the problem. That is why a two-stageresearch approach is applied to build this framework. In the first stage, a conceptual diagram isdesigned using items coming from the company goals, its market and design activity.Interactions and behavior of all these items are deduced from this conceptual diagram. Theseresults are formalized through a generic process. This last one is finally applied to severalexamples from SME working in the mechanical field.
