Collaborative Strategies in Design-Intensive Industries: Knowledge Diversity and Innovation

Customers are paying increasing attention to product design, whether the aesthetic, symbolic or emotional meanings of products. Designers can support companies in exploring customers’ needs and the appropriate signs (such as form, colours, materials, etc) that give meaning to products. Managing collaborations with designers is therefore a critical issue for companies that operate in design-intensive industries. This paper analyses how a company may develop a proper collaborative strategy by identifying an effective portfolio of designers. It shows that companies that innovate collaborate with a broad range of external designers. Most important, innovativeness does not depend on diversity brought by an individual designer, but on diversity brought by the entire portfolio of designers of a firm. The implication is that companies should not focus only on the characteristics of single external parties when developing a collaborative innovation strategy, but, rather, manage carefully a balanced portfolio of collaborators.