Application of Innovation Diffusions Models in Factory Planning for Fuel Cell Systems

The planning of factories and production processes is subject to constantly changing requirements and has always been challenged by uncertain future forecasts. Factory planning projects initiated for the production of innovative products are particularly affected. For these products, there is almost no historical or empirical data available, so the forecasts can only be based on estimated influencing variables and data from similar products. Accordingly, the risk that the selected capacity does not match the actual market demand is higher. While the capacity of a factory represents a long-term investment decision, the spread of innovations can fail within a short timeframe or occur far below the expected level. For this reason, it can be assumed that insights from innovation research offer a planning advantage in forecasting the production potential. Regarding an increasing number of global product innovations, the evaluation of empirical data by means of suitable models and methods is becoming more and more accurate in order to reflect typical market patterns based on recurring customer behaviour. This paper takes up these trends and proposes an approach how innovation metrics can be included in the capacity dimensioning process of factory projects. For this purpose, the BASS diffusion model is used to realistically map different market scenarios for the required capacity curves.