Search results

The concept design-driven innovation focuses on innovating product meanings. It has been studied from a variety of perspectives and contexts since the early 2000s. However, a complete overview of the literature published in this area is currently missing. The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of how design-driven innovation contributes to value creation in product development.

In this systematic literature review, 57 papers and book chapters that cover design-driven innovation were identified and analyzed. An iterative coding process was followed to derive five facets of design-driven innovation that contribute to value creation.

Design-driven innovation creates value by focusing on the intangible values of products. The following five facets of design-driven innovation that contribute to value creation were identified: development of new product meanings, knowledge generation, actors and collaborations, capabilities and process. These facets and their interrelations are presented in a theoretical framework.

The main practical implication of this study is that it is now clear that the five facets of design-driven innovation are interrelated and reinforce each other. Therefore, companies need to approach design-driven innovation from a holistic perspective.

This paper contributes to theory by presenting the theoretical framework that provides an overview of available knowledge and that creates a context for future research.

This study aims to explore the enablers and barriers to design-driven innovation, defined as the innovation of product meanings, in the product-development process. Previous research provides some insights into what enables and hinders design-driven innovation; however a detailed understanding of these factors is missing.

A long-term case study was conducted at a furniture company between 2009 and 2016. Interviews were conducted with respondents within the company, as well as with partners such as retailers and designers.

This paper presents an overview of the identified enablers and barriers. The results demonstrate that enablers and barriers occur in all phases of the product-development process. Second, the connections between enablers and barriers are presented. These are found both within and across different phases, and extend beyond the company’s influence.

This study demonstrates how the innovation of product meanings is influenced throughout all phases of the product-development process. Therefore, there is a need to go beyond the mere identification of enablers and barriers. More is gained from generating a thorough understanding of the causes and connections of these factors, including the changes over time.

This study demonstrates the need for companies to be able to map what enables and hinders design-driven innovation in their product-development process, where a distinction needs to be made between internal and external factors, to enhance value creation.

This study presents a rare long-term case study on design-driven innovation. This study provides new knowledge on the enablers and barriers a company faces while adapting its product-development process to accommodate design-driven innovation.

Leading CEOs have put innovation at the forefront of their agenda for most of the last decade, but they have come to realize that it can take many forms, with different degrees of competitive impact. The paper aims to compare and contrast several forms of innovation and schools CEOs in the latest version, “design‐driven” innovation.

The paper analyzes how a leader can utilize design‐driven innovation.

The paper finds that design‐driven innovation represents a timely convergence of the value innovation perspective and “emotion‐focused design,” a term that denotes an innovation in which the novelty of a message and of a design language prevails over the novelty of functionality and technology.

Design‐driven innovation offers a powerful new approach that draws upon deep socio‐cultural insights to create the basis for new levels of emotional attachment to commercial products.

Innovation theory and practice has tended to focus on two strategies, “technology‐push” and “market‐pull.” Design‐driven innovation offers a third strategy, one that is more like basic sociological research, and just as systematic.

This study aims to explore the patterns and transformational dynamics of the executive–interpreter network in the innovation processes of small- and medium-sized enterprises in hospitality.

Grounded in social network theory and adopting a case-based approach, this study features a multi-case design focusing on three Chinese boutique hotels. Data were collected through Web page and document reviews, participant observations and semistructured interviews.

Results capture how executive–interpreter network dynamics contribute to innovation in small- and medium-sized hotels. Key factors in social networks (e.g. size, scope and strength) shift throughout innovation. This study presents a design-driven approach as a means of innovation. Findings also delineate the network development conditions under which innovation dynamically occurs in boutique hotels.

Practical implications center on how network dynamics help small- and medium-sized hotels innovate more effectively. These insights can assist hotel operators and prospective market entrants in improving their hotels’ performance and competitiveness.

This study blends social network theory with a design-driven approach to explore innovation mechanisms in small- and medium-sized hotels. It offers empirical evidence for practitioners regarding design-driven innovation. Findings enrich the body of knowledge on both design-driven innovation theory and hospitality innovation.

In the stream of works showing the semantic dimension as a core concept of the product innovation (e.g. design driven innovation), the paper aims to present a new business modeling approach driven by design and meanings. Similarly to the concept that the product is not represented only by form and function but also by meaning, the entire business model of a company does not transmit economic and technological value only, but tells a lot of the company from a semantic point of view. The work seeks to point out that companies can focus on the management of meanings to “make sense” of their entire business model moulded in building blocks, and realize what the authors called meaning strategy.

After a detailed overview of the theoretical background grounded in the strategy literature and design one, to support the authors' perspective, an in‐depth study of meaning strategy performed by illycaffè is presented.

The value of the work lies in underlining that the design driven (product) innovation's application can be extended further than only describing successful (product) strategies of design‐intensive manufactures and in the suggestions on how to implement a meaning strategy, creating new meanings not only in the products, but also in the building blocks of a company's business model.

The meaning strategy content and action‐oriented framework proposed and the matrix business model meanings versus building blocks can become tools to communicate the company strategy's pivotal elements and its evolution and they can drive strategists in developing and managing new/existing meanings and building blocks.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the changing of governance modes for the acquisition of external technology in the context of design driven innovation.

This is an explorative study drawing on cases of new product development (NPD) by six design‐oriented Italian firms. In analyzing the cases a longitudinal approach is taken.

The analysis of the cases shows a similar pattern for technology sourcing during the NPD process, starting with informal networks and ending with hierarchical structures. In the early stages of NPD, when market uncertainty and technological uncertainty are very high, these companies choose an informal network. However, once the product concept is defined and the companies need to become familiar with a technology, they move to strategic alliances with partners. In the final stages of NPD, more hierarchical structures seem to prevail.

There are two main limitations of the study. The paper investigates the influence of uncertainty on the choice of governance modes and does not consider other variables that could impact on choice such as assets specificity, frequency of transactions, product complexity, cultural distance among partners, etc. Another limitation of the study is the small set of cases.

From a managerial point of view, this study suggests that firms which develop successful design‐driven innovations follow an organizational pattern for technology sourcing during the NPD process, starting with informal networks and ending with hierarchical structures. Thus it is extremely important for these firms to have an open‐minded management that fosters the creation of a wide external network. This openness shown by the firms towards collaboration with other organizations in order to acquire ideas, new materials and knowledge must be offset by the secure protection of the results of the innovation process. Managers must foresee these needs and find ways to safeguard the results obtained through experimentation by means of patents or exclusive contracts with the supplier.

The paper contributes to the research on the theme of design‐driven innovation, analyzing the evolution and change in governance modes across the new product development process. It thus differentiates from the existing literature adopting a dynamic view, where multiple transactions are taken into consideration.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the dominant strategy and business models of companies and to analyse the awareness of design and the stage of design application in business in its broader sense from the perspective of business executives in the manufacturing sector and professional designers in the design industry that lead to creating successful business models in Latvia and Estonia.

The questionnaire was used with two target groups – business executives (based on NACE 2, B-E sections, i.e. manufacturing companies) and professional designers in the design industry (NACE 2, M 74.10 section). In the first target group, 374 responses of business executives in Latvia and 371 responses of business executives in Estonia were received; in the second target group, 85 respondents in Latvia and 42 respondents in Estonia providing professional design services were analysed to identify the level of design awareness and its application in business in the respective countries.

There are national and regional specifics in Latvia and Estonia based on the development level of micro and macro factors that influence the entire innovation ecosystem. When comparing both countries in these terms, both target groups specify that design is applied more frequently in the processes of product development in Estonia, thus leading to new forms of innovation, than it is in Latvia. Conversely, in Latvia, many business managers still focus on short-term business solutions and cost-reduction as a sole challenge, with limited awareness of management approaches based on the broader application of design as a powerful innovation source for product development, improvement, and renewal of business models.

A suggestion for further research is to replicate the study in Lithuania and explore the perspective of other stakeholders.

The results of this research demonstrate the necessity to change the thinking patterns of business managers in order to develop their skills and capabilities to recognize emerging new driving forces of innovation unfolding through awareness of design and opportunities for its extended application that create successful business models for continuous value generation.

This paper makes a contribution to understanding the current stage of awareness of design and its application in the manufacturing sector in the Baltic States.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how firms achieve competitiveness by implementing design-driven innovation.

This paper is a detailed longitudinal analysis of the design innovation underpinning the Norwegian furniture industry. Using a data set spanning 40 years (1976-2015) of design patents by both Norwegian firms and inventors, the authors map the coinventor connectivity of the design-innovation clusters of Norway, both within the country and with foreign locations.

Using network analysis, the authors find that most of the rise of co-inventor connectivity within Norwegian furniture industry’s design innovation is occurring within the country. More surprisingly, the leading firms and star inventors are less likely to collaborate internationally, i.e. they are characterized by greater innovative “lock-in”.

The exploration of all the potential reasons for the “lock-in” in design innovation of the Norwegian furniture industry is beyond the scope of this paper. A particularly interesting avenue for future research would be to compare the coinventor connectivity of traditional sectors like furniture with more high technology sectors within Norway.

By assessing a detailed and historical context of the evolution of Norwegian furniture industry, the paper provides a fairly comprehensive study of design innovation as a source of firms’ competitiveness, which has been rarely explored. The authors suggest that innovative “lock-in” may be more likely to arise in the traditional sectors of an economy and the forces may be particularly strong for those firms and individuals that have the highest domestic connectedness and status.

Notwithstanding the importance innovation scholars have accredited to design-driven innovation (DDI), no attempts have been made so far to systematically study whether and how this innovation strategy can be used in the retail context in order to gain and nurture competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to make a first step towards closing this gap, and therefore understand whether and how companies involved in retail service can create competitive advantage by the adoption of a strategy based on innovation of meanings.

Due to the complex ecosystem of variables that inevitably influence the problem, the case study approach represents the best option to grasp the different aspects highlighted by the research objectives. The analysis undertook a thorough and systematic comparison with the use of an ad hoc “paired comparison method”, in which common systemic characteristics have been intended as a controlled variable in order to minimise the variance and quantity of factors that can have an impact on the selected case studies; intersystemic differences have been understood as explanatory variables to decree the contribution in terms of novelty in relation to the current paradigm.

The paper provides empirical insights about how radical innovation in meanings can be a very important lever on which retail firms can act to gain and nurture their competitive advantage.

Of course the study has several limitations, which represent however opportunities for future research. The authors say that the findings, given the exploratory nature of the study, cannot be generalised to any population of firms or markets, rather they should be used as a basis to develop theoretical understanding of a complex phenomenon and draw research propositions and hypotheses to be tested in subsequent deductive empirical research.

This paper highlights the importance to think, beyond shopping experience, at the role of new meanings when designing service innovation in retail firms. Although the findings do not have statistical relevance, given the exploratory nature of the study, they suggest that DDI can be a viable option for retail firm managers to improve their firms’ competitiveness.

The study presented in this paper has merit to broaden the generalisability of the DDI model to other industries, different from those where it was initially studied and applied. This is an important step toward conceptualising DDI as a novel management paradigm.

This paper aims to expand the understanding of the design thinking (DT) field and provides evidence that DT as an innovation mindset centered on user/human needs is able to lead enterprises to the development of radical product innovation.

The study is based on an illustrative case analysis of four eras of radical innovations in the watch industry, from the mechanical wristwatches to smartwatches.

The findings from the watch industry substantiate the developed DT triangle framework for designers, managers and executives, enabling the development of radical product innovation.

The study provides evidence for the claim that human-centered approach (rather than design-driven, meaning-changing approach) in DT can successfully lead to radical product innovations. For this, this paper distinguishes between “need” and “meaning” in the DT field and reemphasize the role of creating empathy with users to be able to identify their newly shaped needs. Fulfilling these newly shaped needs would ultimately result in the development of radically new products.