Effects of designer involvement in the new product development process: Evidence from Japanese manufacturing companies

IF 4.6 1区工程技术 Q2 ENGINEERING, MANUFACTURING

Design Studies Pub Date : 2026-05-01 Epub Date: 2026-04-28 DOI:10.1016/j.destud.2026.101404

Yosuke Kanno

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

As the strategic importance of design in firms has increased, design is no longer understood merely as product aesthetics or styling, but as a professional function that influences the entire new product development (NPD) process through the translation of user knowledge, meaning creation, and visualization and prototyping. Prior research has repeatedly emphasized the value of designers’ early and sustained involvement in NPD. However, given that NPD unfolds as a staged process under time and cost constraints, it is not self-evident through which outcome pathways designer involvement ultimately translates into business performance. In particular, theoretical frameworks and quantitative evidence remain limited that systematically distinguish between product innovativeness and development efficiency as distinct outcome dimensions and compare the effects of stage-specific designer involvement across them.

This study bridges two largely parallel research streams—designer involvement research and concurrent engineering (CE)—by reframing designer involvement in NPD as an actor-specific resource allocation problem: at which stage, and to what extent, should professional design resources be deployed. Using project-level data from Japanese manufacturing firms, the study simultaneously measures designers’ involvement intensity at three NPD stages—market research and analysis, idea and concept development, and engineering and prototyping—and examines how such involvement affects business performance through product innovativeness and development efficiency, employing structural equation modeling. The results show that designer involvement does not operate through a single performance pathway; rather, its value creation differs by stage and by outcome dimension. Moreover, the stage at which designer involvement exerts the greatest leverage shifts depending on market uncertainty. These findings challenge uniform prescriptions that advocate front-loading designer involvement and instead offer a theoretical reconceptualization of design in NPD as a dynamic and context-dependent allocation of professional resources that mediates the tension between innovativeness and efficiency.

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设计师参与新产品开发过程的影响：来自日本制造企业的证据

随着设计在企业中的战略重要性日益增加，设计不再仅仅被理解为产品美学或造型，而是作为一种专业功能，通过用户知识的翻译、意义创造、可视化和原型设计来影响整个新产品开发（NPD）过程。先前的研究一再强调设计师早期和持续参与新产品开发的价值。然而，考虑到新产品开发是一个在时间和成本限制下的阶段性过程，设计师参与的结果途径最终转化为业务绩效的途径并不明显。特别是，理论框架和定量证据仍然有限，无法系统地区分产品创新性和开发效率作为不同的结果维度，并比较特定阶段设计师参与的影响。本研究将两个基本平行的研究流——设计师参与研究和并行工程（CE）——连接起来，将设计师参与新产品开发重新定义为一个特定于参与者的资源分配问题：专业设计资源应该在哪个阶段，以及在多大程度上被部署。利用日本制造企业的项目级数据，本研究同时测量了设计师在三个新产品开发阶段（市场研究和分析、创意和概念开发、工程和原型设计）的参与强度，并采用结构方程模型，考察了这种参与如何通过产品创新和开发效率影响企业绩效。结果表明，设计师参与并不通过单一的绩效途径；相反，它的价值创造因阶段和结果维度而异。此外，设计师参与发挥最大杠杆作用的阶段取决于市场的不确定性。这些发现挑战了倡导设计师参与的统一规定，而是提供了一个理论的重新概念化，将新产品开发中的设计作为一种动态的、依赖于环境的专业资源分配，调解创新和效率之间的紧张关系。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Design Studies 工程技术-工程：制造

CiteScore

8.60

自引率

20.00%

发文量

审稿时长

40 days

期刊介绍： Design Studies is a leading international academic journal focused on developing understanding of design processes. It studies design activity across all domains of application, including engineering and product design, architectural and urban design, computer artefacts and systems design. It therefore provides an interdisciplinary forum for the analysis, development and discussion of fundamental aspects of design activity, from cognition and methodology to values and philosophy. Design Studies publishes work that is concerned with the process of designing, and is relevant to a broad audience of researchers, teachers and practitioners. We welcome original, scientific and scholarly research papers reporting studies concerned with the process of designing in all its many fields, or furthering the development and application of new knowledge relating to design process. Papers should be written to be intelligible and pertinent to a wide range of readership across different design domains. To be relevant for this journal, a paper has to offer something that gives new insight into or knowledge about the design process, or assists new development of the processes of designing.