Product Design: A Review and Research Agenda for Management Studies

In this paper, we review research on product design in the broad domain of business studies. We highlight established and emerging perspectives and lines of inquiry, and organize them around three core areas, corresponding to different stages of the design process (design activities, design choices, design results). We identify and discuss avenues for further research at the intersection of these bodies of research, and we argue that management scholars possess conceptual and methodological tools suited to enrich research on design and to effectively pursue lines of investigation only partially addressed by other communities, such as the construction and deployment of design capabilities, or the organizational and institutional context of design activities.