Introduction to the Special Issue on Design and Development

By design and development I mean the cognitive and organizational processes by which artifacts are created to address market opportunities, business problems, and other human or societal needs. While the most common industrial context for design and development is product development, I believe that the academic study of design and development can be usefully broadened to include the development of production processes and one-of-a-kind systems. I also believe that many design and development problems are common across the domains of physical goods, software, and services. Academic interest in design and development has been increasing steadily for at least a decade. What had been a somewhat isolated area of inquiry within marketing departments and some engineering departments, has become a recognized endeavor involving researchers from departments of engineering, marketing, industrial design, operations management, accounting, and strategy, among others. As an academic community, we can be proud of this locus of energy and of the substantial body of knowledge that has been developed. One of the drivers of the increased academic interest in design and development is an increasing level of challenge faced in industrial practice. Most firms confront one or more of the following trends. • The breadth of products in many markets is increasing, with more products addressing smaller market segments. • The frequency of product introductions has increased dramatically in many industries. • Lead times for product development have been compressed. • Products have ever-shorter market life cycles. • Product complexity is increasing. • Product development and production activities are often distributed across a network of firms instead of within a single integrated firm. As a result of these factors and others, design and development increasingly involves the creation of families of products by networks of firms on compressed schedules. This landscape presents a rich set of research opportunities. Despite the obvious importance of design and development in industrial practice, and the apparent abundance of research opportunities, there are several daunting organizational and cultural inhibitors to academic research in design and development. In the archetypal twentieth-century manufacturing firm, responsibility for product development was often assigned to a research and development (R&D) function. Although there is a basic isomorphism between traditional business functions and academic units, almost no universities have an organizational entity corresponding to R&D. A very few universities have groups focused on technological innovation, but these groups tend to be concerned with the evolution and development of fundamental technologies, and not with project-level activity within a single firm. Furthermore, very few faculty in engineering schools address design and development problems. In fact, engineering schools could perhaps better be labeled schools of applied science. So, while on the one hand, product development is not compartmentalized within a single academic entity, it also has no home in what remains a highly departmentalized environment. Design and development problems not only span traditional departmental boundaries, they span the typical university divisions between management schools and engineering schools. In my view, this is at least partly because our division of issues into “management” and “engineering” is somewhat arbitrary. In a narrow sense, management might be defined as the coordination of human and other organizational resources, yet very little of the research in management schools falls into this category. (In some ways, schools of management could be better labeled schools of “business engineering.”) For example, why is conjoint analysis considered “management,” while