Exploratory study to capture design expenditure in firms

Product innovation is increasingly considered to be a central source for competitive advantage and a crucial driver for economic growth. Corporations are trying to face the challenges of global competition by launching new products that better satisfy explicit and latent user needs and desires, and that have improved performance, superior functionality, lower cost, higher symbolic and emotional value, and sustainable impact on the environment. In this scenario, companies are seeking to understand how new products may be conceived and developed successfully. Managing product development is a major challenge because of its inherent uncertain, complex and multidisciplinary nature. Product development requires the management of creative resources and experimental processes with uncertain outputs. Also, it requires the management of many different types of interfaces: both interactions between different units within a firm (marketing, research, manufacturing, etc.) and interactions with external actors, being them users, suppliers, partners, designers, or universities. The interfaces today cross the borders of countries and continents. Different types of knowledge, competencies, attitudes and values have to work together. In the last years the list of challenges has been extended by the emergence of communities of experts who are developing new ideas and even products beside traditional firms. It becomes more important to understand how they work and how companies can cooperate with them . Research on product development management is challenged by this uncertain, complex and multidisciplinary nature. In order to understand the dynamics of new product conception and development, scholars have increasingly to operate across different disciplines: strategy, management of innovation, technology and R&D management, project management, research policy, marketing, design, anthropology, sociology, organization, operations management, etc.