An alternative resource for technology innovation: Do industrial designers create superior invention?

Recent design studies have advocated how design practices enhance innovation in various fields. Indeed, the latest case study discovered that industrial designers can contribute even in natural science research. On the other hand, the majority of R&D management scholars and practitioners have long overlooked the value of collaboration between R&D engineers and industrial designers. To fill the gap, in this study, we test the link between an enrollment of industrial designers in inventing activities and their impacts on inventing outcomes using patent applications to Japan Patent Office from a Japanese electronics manufacturer. By connecting each inventor's individual affiliation information collected from the design patent, we constructed 75,932 invention-level data points for inventor affiliations to use in our regression analysis. Our analysis reveals a significant contribution by industrial designers to high-impact inventions. Our estimation result shows that an enrollment of industrial designers increases forward citations of a focal patent application by an average of 17%. We can interpret that these contributions of industrial designers come from their latent demand-oriented thinking, which concurs with recent design studies. This study provides the implication for R&D managers that they should not exclude industrial designers when seeking to develop innovative technologies.