Design-Driven Innovation Mechanisms

An increased number of enterprises realize that a good product design is critical to their success in the knowledge-based economy.Many leading companies have been exploring the " design-driven innovation" model by integrating social,cultural and technological factors into innovative products.The model focuses on enhancing human creativity through product innovation from the perspectives of product-human,and product-society relationships.Although Chinese enterprises have been adopting the " design-driven innovation black box," they lack a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between design and innovation.Most Chinese companies do not understand the process of systematic interactions among resource,capability and innovation performance in the design-driven innovation. Our literature review and case studies raise two fundamental problems:(1) what are key elements of resource design?(2)how do these elements affect innovation capability and,in turn,innovation performance? This paper begins with a thorough literature review on design-driven innovation,resource-based theories,knowledge network and organizational behavior.It presents an exploratory case study on five typical design-driven innovation projects in China.The study concludes with a conceptual model of design-driven innovations based on resource-based theories.The model can be summarized as a three-step path: from design resources to design innovation capabilities,and finally,to innovation performance.This model is further elaborated with a set of hypotheses.These hypotheses are then validated via a large-scale questionnaire and the structural equation model(SEM) programming. The outline and conclusion of this research are as follows: 1.There are three types of resources including internal design resources,external social-cultural resources,and external technological resources.These resources are important to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of innovations.We argue that internal design resources are the most important because they have the most direct impact on performance.This finding implies that an enterprise must depend primarily on itself during the implementation of design-driven innovations.In the meantime,an enterprise also needs to pay attention to potential benefits from the perspectives of external social-cultural and technological knowledge. 2.An enterprise's design innovation capability has two folds,one is the design of product semantics,the other is the design of product functions.These two capabilities have an important effect on design performance.In fact,the impact of design resource on the innovation performance comes from these two capabilities.Internal design resources affect innovation performance through both capabilities,while external social-cultural resources can have impact on innovation performance only through the semantic of design capability.Likewise,external technological resources affect innovation performance only through the functional design capability. The systematic set of theories and methodologies presented helps Chinese enterprises improve their design capability and innovative performance.