Thought of the Day - TOC For R&D

While reading It's Not Luck (see notes below) it occurred to me that Goldratt has tackled a lot of topics; Production, Marketing, Project Management and ERP systems. He has probably tackled even more in his ancillary books, but to my knowledge he has never applied TOC (Theory of Constraints) to R&D (Research and Development) or NPD (New Product Development).

You could argue that the marketing covered in It's Not Luck is all about NPD. You are devising new offerings for the market, but it's scope is restricted by the assumptions that: a) There is no money to make physical changes to the product and b) Provided you modify the existing offer to suit the customer that you can fulfil their requirements. What about situations where the existing product, regardless of how the offer is packaged does not sufficiently satisfy the customer?

I suspect there is an answer somewhere in his books and i can see how you could relax the constraints on the methods to construct 'unrefusable offers' to create 'unrefusable products' but i wonder if that is sufficient to cover the full spectrum of R&D. While i'm sure it would help you with re-engineering of existing products to better meet customer requirements and could even enable you to create new products from the ground up to optimally meet these needs, i fear it lacks the potential to imagine new products to meet needs customers do not even know they have.

In other words is there a way to apply TOC to the creative process and is it possibly linked with TRIZ? It might just be a coincidence but both are obsessed with conflicts, breaking assumptions and in love with simple solutions ...