You're tasked with redesigning a vehicle on a tight budget. How can you prioritize innovation in the process?

This is the most important section and it needs to be done very early in the program to allow new technologies to be developed, validated and implemented within budget.

Rightly said, any product design change is for customer benefit, as product wise has been taken care off with initial designing, technical, need to understand what is appreciated what more is wanted, try to optimize

The skill and methadology which drives the innovation is benchmarking & reverse engineering the previous designs and identifying the previous mistakes or failures. Situation where budget is a constraint, innovation comes from economical product development and understanding from the perspective of customers what they expect from the product. Redesigning the vehicle involves making changes to different subsystems but everything doesn't need to be changed. That's where, automotive manufacturers introduce facelift versions of their previous models, giving improvement in different areas in every facelift model.

Global scalable solutions can be a powerful approach to identifying quick wins that enhance consumer perception of your product’s innovation. By prioritizing systems that have a high impact on your target customers, based on market research, the next step is to identify global suppliers capable of delivering substantial value through large-scale adoption across multiple OEMs. For example, the widespread implementation of large-screen HMIs, multimedia screens, and sustainable materials for fabrics and interior trims can significantly elevate product perception while offsetting the costs of legacy systems at lower scales.

In my experience, wherein during my bachelor's as I was vehicle dynamics lead & project manager for the student motorsport team, optimizing our Quad-Bike's design was of utmost importance, in our case, we did it by optimizing vehicle dynamics & chassis design to ease manufacturing & making an economical design. This experience taught me the importance of design & prototype development cycle and how crucial it is for the further development. Everything can't be 100% perfect, even the carnot engine can't 100% efficient. By this, I want to convey that design optimization takes place by defining target parameters, thereby making changes to the design & optimizing it.

I believe that collaboration is the key to driving innovation, particularly between educational institutions and industry partners. Industry partners bring current market knowledge and real-world problem statements, while educational institutions contribute fresh perspectives and research expertise. Together, they form the perfect combination: industry provides the challenges and cutting-edge technology, and academia offers innovative solutions through bright young minds.