The literature fails in giving clear definition of innovation. Any research achievement by itself should not considered innovation in fact, even if researchers have speculated potential development for their inventions, only few may be considered true innovations (Cohen and Winn, 2007). It has to be recognising, indeed, that innovation could be driven by non-technological factors such are creativity, design and new business models.

The difference between Website Design Essex invention and innovation resides in the fact that the first can occur in a specific (scientific or industrial) environment, while innovation implies acceptance by the market and it is here that industrial design could play a critical role.

Though still often associated solely with aesthetics, the application of design is much broader and it is increasingly recognized as a key discipline to bring ideas to the market, transforming them into user-friendly and appealing products or services.

These basic concepts of competitiveness and sustainability could be strictly derived from Life evolution model. Life, which is the biological expression of sustainable growth, has developed by means of evolutional competition path between species generated by fortuitous mutations in a changing environment. As in Nature happens that not all mutations lead to success living entities, as it is in product design where not all research achievements give rise to product innovation (this is the reason why often the traditional approach to technology transfer fails in generating innovation).

From an evolutionary point of view, product innovation has to be considered like a living entity evolution where research achievements are equivalent to chaotic and stochastic mutations and that Chaos leads to Evolution as well as Creativity leads to Sustainable products as a result of a series of events and mutations that are generated during an adaptive design path.

A dynamical instability, a condition first exposed by Poincaré (1905) that mentions to an inherent lack of predictability in some physical systems. 

But which creative and technological adaptive design process is involved in the identification of a sustainable product? Should we apply a systematic, as several design methods describe, or a more dynamic systemic approach?

Systematic approach: The least complex systems are natural systems that are not organic, those that cybernetic call “trivial machines”; crystals, clouds, rivers, elementary particles and entire galaxies (lifeless) fall into this category, as well as all the artificial devices completely describable in terms of inputs/outputs. These systems do not show the least complex adaptive interactions with the environment;

Systemic approach: Complex systems (medium to high complexity) are all systems of the biosphere, from bacteria to the human population. Complex systems are adaptive and all of them are associated with the so-called emergent phenomena (life, mind, social organization, etc.). Complex systems in their evolutionary path are therefore always far from equilibrium and move in a space of infinite behavioural possibilities.

Results and Discussion

Our theory is exploring through a systemic approach this novel area of innovation, in search of suitable solutions for new developments to be exploited for industrial applications, by facing constraints and opportunities for new technological developments using specific software tools to model reality (Artificial Intelligence) from structural to life cycle aspects, processing, visualization, marketing and others in an integrated design process testing their fitness (integrated design method).

The new concept underlined by our vision of Evolutionary design is the approach to research (for new material and technologies) and design development through their natural parallel adaptive evolution and selection, driven by the different aspects of the complex nature of sustainability.