A Design Framework for Social Product Development

Social product development (SPD) is defined as a group of “coalescing tools and socio-technologies” represented by several tenants including crowdsourcing, internet-based mass collaboration, open innovation, and cloud-based design and manufacture. Existing examples of SPD have resulted in enhanced collaboration in design teams, shorter lead times, and significant reductions in R&D costs. Despite these potential benefits, guidance on how to conduct SPD is lacking in existing literature and the use of SPD tenants in the industry is limited. The aim of this article is to present a framework to guide the application of SPD. As part of this framework, the authors present a tool for the selection of SPD tenants that allows users to select an SPD tenant based on their requirements and capabilities. The framework allows practitioners to consider how SPD tenants can be used to solve design problems and allows the user to design SPD tenants with consideration of their own needs. This article concludes with a validation activity and discussion on future research directions in this field.