Search results

This paper aims to investigate the phases of new product development within the design-driven innovation (DDI) process, the role of designers and collaborators in the process and how this process relates to some quality principles.

This study adopted a qualitative approach using Gioia methodology. In particular, four Italian manufacturing companies in the home appliances and furniture industry were selected, and data mainly collected through direct interviews were analysed through content analysis.

The new product development related to DDI includes the following phases: the company brief, the designer research, the concept of the designer, the design, legal protection, prototyping, production and the market launch. Designers play a strategic role in the above phases of DDI, but other actors also cooperate and some quality principles affect positively on the process. This study proposes a model for a DDI process in the home appliances and furniture sector.

Although this exploratory study was conducted on only four companies, it advances the DDI research in relation to new product development.

This study makes recommendations to entrepreneurs and managers on how to innovate successfully and to effectively manage designers and collaborators to ensure competition.

This analysis highlights that design-based innovation contributes to improving the quality of life of consumers.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first qualitative study to examine the phases of new product development in DDI process, the actors involved and relationship to quality principles for the Italian home appliances and furniture sector.

The purpose of this paper is to present a critical literature review on design management.

The map of the field is based on the analysing the chain of associations between the papers (Latour, 1987). The strategy for this review is informed by the methodology described by Callon et al. (1986) on following the construction of the arguments. The first search was conducted in EBESCO and Web of Science looking for papers dealing with design management; “design management”; innovat* and design* in the management, including title, keywords and abstract. It resulted in 8,216 articles that were exported and downloaded in a database.

Five groups emerged: design as rational decision making, industrial design, managing as designing, design as proposals of new meaning and design as a network construction.

This paper maps the role of designers in innovation and design management literature. Design management is a variegated field of research, and the focus of this paper has been on product design in business and management literature. To begin with, the research philosophy which was inferred by analysing the preferred methodology in the papers belonging to five perspectives was analysed, and the ontology, essence, metaphysics delineated. Then, a map of the field of on the role of designers was proposed. The author concluded with a reflection of a possible research agenda in design management, focussing on investigating the role of designers in transformational economies, such as Vietnam.

In a world where innovation became a “buzzword” and everyone within companies is required to foster innovation, the engagement of people toward innovation is fundamental to prompt individual motivation and actions to make innovation happen. However, despite the relevance of the relationship between engagement and innovation, the literature on the topic appears still fragmented. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the topic through a systematic literature review.

A final sample of 108 papers has been selected and analyzed through co-citation and text mining analyses. The former enabled the analysis of the structure of the theoretical foundation of the filed, while the latter facilitated a systematic and unbiased content-driven review of the literature.

The results of the analysis indicated two main areas of interest describing the relationship between engagement and innovation. On the one hand, there is the focus on “engagement as an attitude,” intended as the capacity of individuals to generate and realize innovation. On the other hand, there is a stream of literature focused on “engagement as involvement,” which refers to co-innovation paradigms, involving both internal and external stakeholders.

From an academic perspective, this paper highlights the relevance of the “human-side” of innovation, proposing avenues for future research that dig into the relationship between people's engagement and innovation dynamics. Moreover, it shows how the recent developments in the innovation management literature are coherent with this emerging relevance of the human perspective in innovation.

From a practitioner’s perspective, this paper helps managers by highlighting the two different approaches that they can have in terms of engagement. The study aims to help them in identifying the kind of engagement they are looking for in their employees and other innovation stakeholder having the support to find relevant studies in that direction.

The study unveils how the evolution of both areas over the years is strictly related to the megatrends of innovation fields, which are the main areas of knowledge not covered yet. Therefore, a research agenda is proposed.

Innovation dynamics have been the object of study of several researchers, focusing in particular on technological innovation and the emergence of a dominant design. However, these models have been challenged by how the pervasiveness of digital technologies is speeding up the pace at which innovation evolves. On the other hand, a growing body of literature in innovation management has started underlining the relevance of new product and service meanings as a source of innovation.

This research aims to study the different innovation dynamics within an industry, investigating not only how companies react to fast-changing functional advancements but rather how their behavior changes as shifts in meaning occur. To properly assess the phenomenon, this longitudinal study analyzes the social media industry, strongly subjected to continuous functional advancements, through a deep dive in the 160 innovations introduced between 2003 and 2017 by the eight leading players in the industry.

Our results illustrate the co-existence of different approaches to innovation within an industry and hint that consequent and fast cycles of innovation in both functionalities and meanings discourage the emergence of a dominant design.

Our results help managers and innovators acknowledge the possibility to leverage not just on the technological dimension of innovation but also the reason why people use a given product or service, innovating its meaning. Furthermore, our results recognize the co-existence of different innovation streams upon which innovators can act.

This research contributes to the extant literature in innovation management, extending the classical models of innovation dynamics by including the evolution of innovations of meaning in relation to technological innovation.

To overcome change management challenges, organizations often rely on stories as means of communication. Storytelling has emerged as a leading change management tool to influence and bring people on sharing knowledge. Nevertheless, this study aims to suggest stories of change as a more effective tool that helps people in taking action toward transformation processes.

The authors apply design science research to develop and evaluate how writing a prospective story engages organizational actors in the transformation process. The authors test the story-making artifact in a field study with five companies and 115 employees who participated in 75 workshops.

Using the findings to discuss the role of story-making in facilitating the emergence of new behaviors in transformation processes, the authors link story-making with the opportunity to make change happen through knowledge dissemination rather than merely understanding it.

The authors illustrate the role of iterations, peers and self-criticism that help story-makers embrace sensemaking, developing a shared knowledge based that influence individual actions.

The authors propose the story-making approach that organizations can follow to nurture change to make transformation happen through knowledge cocreation.

The research explores story-making as an individual act of writing prospective stories to facilitate the emergence of new behaviors through shared knowledge.

The aim of this paper is to explore whether open innovation is emerging in the Italian fashion industry.

Based on available studies on innovation and open innovation, we first identified the main facets of open innovation within the industry investigated, such as the process of searching for new ideas, the involvement of external partners in the new product development process and the use of collaboration mechanisms between supply chain partners. Starting from these findings, the authors designed a semi-structured questionnaire that was used as a guideline for 15 case studies, carried out in the Italian fashion industry.

The outcomes from the case studies allow drawing some conclusions about the emergency of open innovation in the fashion industry and the related patterns.

Given its exploratory nature, this study is expected to start a debate about open innovation in the fashion industry, as well as to encourage future studies in this field.

Engaging with customers and addressing unmet value have become increasingly challenging within multi-stakeholder environments of service innovation. Therefore, this paper aims to address this challenge by studying how strategic design abilities address unmet value in service engagement strategies.

The authors conducted a qualitative inductive study at a multinational corporation and interviewed marketing and design professionals on their innovation practices in service engagement strategies.

From the inductive analysis, this study identified three strategic design abilities that effectively contribute to addressing unmet value throughout the co-evolving process of service engagement: envisioning value, modelling value and engaging value. Based on this, this study proposes the emerging co-evolving loop framework of service engagement strategies.

The limitation of this emerging theory is a lack of broad generalizability with mutual exclusivity or collective exhaustiveness across industries. A theoretical implication of the framework is the integration of strategic design and services marketing towards co-created engagement strategies.

The service engagement loop framework can be of great value to service innovation processes, for which an integrated, cross-functional approach is often missing.

The findings further suggest that next to a methodological skillset, strategic design abilities consist of a distinct mindset.

This paper introduces strategic design abilities to address unmet value and proposes a novel co-evolving loop framework of service engagement strategies.