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In recent decades, the literature on technology management has proposed S-curves as promising tools for analyzing the life-cycle of technological innovation in order to support company strategies and policies. Nevertheless, the scant attention devoted to the analytical foundations of the S-curve model has limited its capacity to actually model the performance of technological innovation.

Since early development phases of a new industrial product, realistic simulations can be performed in virtual environment to study the human-machine interaction. In a virtual lab it is possible to make experiments to assess the ergonomics of the new product with manikins simulating the human body, and dealing with the problem of anthropometrical variation. Although such sophisticated tools are available, there is still need of a methodo-logical framework aimed at efficiently organizing the experiments in virtual lab. This paper provides an overview of the Robust Ergonomic Virtual Design (REVD), a methodology developed by the authors in the course of the last years. It allows obtaining products whose ergonomic performances are as much insensitive as possible to the anthropometrical variation affecting the product during its life cycle. Both the optimal setting of main design parameters and, when necessary, the setting of adjustment parameters, are the focus of this methodology. Further-more, a new way of dealing with the anthropometrical noise factor is proposed. Some applications with detailed analysis are presented

The chapter deals with the problem of assessing the quality of land cover data bases, since only high quality products are useful for knowledge and management of the territory. After a brief analysis of main aspects of quality control and validation of land cover data bases, the main concepts of statistical quality control methods are recalled, in order to point out how some quality control pro-cedures for land cover data bases can be formalized and improved taking advan-tage of statistical quality control methods. Then, sequential and two-step adaptive procedures are proposed with various quality indices, for continuously improving the quality of land cover data bases during the production process, in order to satisfy the user’s needs.

In this work an original design strategy for product innovation is presented. This strategy is based on a continuous innovation process and takes advantages of both emotional design methodologies and participative design tools in Virtual Reality (VR). It combines techniques for user need identification and virtual reality ex-periments to simulate user-product interaction. This original combination of tech-niques allows the early evaluation of the new product concepts’ quality which is essential for the success of the innovation. To show the main phases of this strategy, three case studies are briefly introduced. In the first case study, concerning the railway coach interiors design, the impor-tance of both the identification of user needs and the evaluation session in VR is highlighted. In the second case study, concerning the railway seat design, the techniques used to generate new concepts and to choose the optimal one among them are briefly illustrated. Finally, in the third case study, concerning the innova-tion of a Postural Seat System, the continuous innovation iterative cycle, which is essential in the statistical design for innovation strategy, is described starting from the designer sketches.