Hi, Jurgen,
Thanks for the reminder: "remember what I have asked for: direct me to a paper, publication, research where somebody tried to measure the impact of design in a product development process?" I've got a collection of about 220 articles and reports on design policy, along with some good material on strategic design and policy design. Some of these documents address the issue of economic value and how much design contributes to the economy or to industrial process. In the next two weeks, I've got to review these for a scopin study, and when I do, I'll mark out the ones that may help you.
Most of these studies involve macroeconomic analysis of the contributions that the design sector makes to the economy, but passages in several articles suggest that they may contain microeconomic analysis at the firm level. So far, I have not identified specific data on the impact of design in any specific case of product development. This, of course, is what you seek, and some clear cases would be most interesting.
While I know of examples of product relaunches where one can infer from a successful relaunch that design contributes value, the challenges of isolating the contribution are great. This is especially true where much of the market was already occupied by an original product when consumers were happy enough with the first product not to buy the relaunched product. But there are a few highly visible cases where you can draw reasoned inferential evidence: the huge success of the second versions or updates on successful software, much of it purchases again by users of the first version is a case in point. Another example involves the millions of people who owned a fully functioning iPad -- as I did -- and went out to buy an iPad2 soon after the release. The new design features in hardware and software contributed to that purchase decision. From publicly accessible figures on these kinds of products, you can make some reasonable statements about the economic contribution of design based on publicly reported sales data.
The method is simple. Identify products that demonstrate these kinds of attributes. Show the difference between old purchase figures and new purchase figures including appropriate allowances for known users or percentages of users who owned the earlier version and then bought the new version. Increase in first sales and second sales to known users will give you a good benchmark.
Best regards,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design
Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life | University of Chicago Press | http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226033594
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