A conceptual designer-led New Product Development process model for Chinese SMEs

Design oriented innovation has been recognized as beneficial strategy for organisational development. However, limited research explored how it can be embedded into the New Product Development (NPD) practice in Chinese Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This research mainly focuses on producing a conceptual designer-led NPD process model for introducing design oriented strategy to Chinese manufacturing SMEs. Literature review is main methods in this stage for understanding Chinese context and enriching NPD relevant knowledge, by analyzing and synthesizing knowledge obtained from these two domains, four factors was identified as critical factors for building this conceptual model: product characteristic, market orientation, fast reaction and cost valuation. A conceptual designer-led NPD process model with six phases is produced by extending practical design process model and considering of above four critical factors, these phases are: briefing, ideation, concept design, detail design, prototyping, and launch. Tasks and methods in each step were given. It implies that this model can save companies' adoption time, and use design as marketing tool is just about time and indirectly saving cost, benefit for companies' long term interests. However, this model was built by conceptually analyzing and synthesizing knowledge from literatures, further empirical investigation worth to be made to understand companies' real-time situation, optimize this conceptual model and evaluate it by practical application.