Increasing market dynamics and shorter product development and product life cycles cause firms to develop new products more and more frequently. To satisfy a high future external market variety with low internal complexity, Design for Variety is carried out for initial structuring of the prospective product family. The influence of new to introduce product features on the product components is estimated in order to assess the future role of the components within the system under consideration. With help of graph theory and the graph visualisation and analysis software Cytoscape, the product components are examined regarding their activeness, passiveness and centrality values. For achieving this, a methodical procedure is presented to set up the applied development framework and to compute effect systems as directed graphs. The product components are then evaluated using a portfolio matrix to identify the impact of the increasing generational variety.
