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Collaborating with design consultancy firms for effective strategic decision-making in new product development

conference contribution
posted on 2024-10-31, 17:24 authored by Giulia Calabretta, Gerda Gemser, Nachoem Wijnberg, P.P.M Hekkert
In order to contain risks and increase the profitability of innovation efforts, firms frequently engage in joint innovation activities with external sources of knowledge such as design consultancies. Innovation literature has given limited consideration to the strategic role that design consultancies can play in the innovation efforts of their clients. A plausible explanation for this may reside in the difficulty to assess and quantify the quality of their output, given the intangibility of the output itself and the difficulty of connecting a knowledge intensive output to clients' performance indicators. By analysing the data from seven dyadic case studies, we examine design consultancies' impact on their clients' strategic decision-making as a way of capturing their strategic role in clients' innovation efforts. We conclude that design consultancies can influence 'clients' strategic decisions by enhancing the two main strategic decision-making mechanisms identified by the literature: rationality and intuition. Design consultancies' impact on strategic decision-making is then transferred to some indicators of innovation performance. An early involvement in problem definition and long-term relationships with clients seems to strengthen design professionals' influence.

History

Start page

128

End page

141

Total pages

14

Outlet

Design for Business: Volume 2

Editors

Kristin McCourtie, Luke Farrugia, Gjoko Muratovski

Name of conference

Design for Business: Volume 2

Publisher

Intellect

Place published

Bristol, United Kingdom

Start date

2013-04-30

End date

2013-04-30

Language

English

Copyright

© 2014 Intellect Ltd. All rights reserved.

Former Identifier

2006046604

Esploro creation date

2020-06-22

Fedora creation date

2015-01-13

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