This paper presents approaches to compare criteria and help designers make decisions based on trade-offs between criteria. The impetus for the paper is to identify possible directions to improve/innovate a product and propose a value shell model displaying various criteria or their combination to represent the effort needed to improve the criteria. The focus is on automotive market and approaches in industry and government are differentiated. Since the effort (manpower, cost and time) needed to improve a product is not public knowledge, the paper leaves the evaluation of the approach to users.
