Customizing Concurrent Engineering Processes: Five Case Studies

Once hailed as the salvation of U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, concurrent engineering (CE) offers the potential for faster development of higher quality, more producible products. Unlike traditional, serial approaches to new product development (NPD), CE emphasizes cross-functional integration and concurrent development of a product and its associated processes. As Morgan L. Swink, J. Christopher Sandvig, and Vincent A. Mabert explain, however, CE is not a plug-and-play process. Successful CE implementation approaches differ depending on such factors as product characteristics, customer needs, and technology requirements. We can better understand those differences by examining CE implementation in the five NPD programs discussed here: the Boeing 777 aircraft, the heavy duty diesel engine at Cummins Engine Co., the thermoplastic olefin automotive coating at Red Spot Paint and Varnish Co., the airborne vehicle forward-looking infrared night vision system at Texas Instruments, and the digital satellite system at Thomson Consumer Electronics. Teams provide the primary integration mechanism in CE programs, and three types of teams appeared frequently in these projects: a program management team, a technical team, and numerous design-build teams. Depending on the project's complexity, an integration team may be needed to consolidate the efforts of various design-build teams. Task forces also may be formed to address specific problems, such as investigating an emerging technology. Some projects emphasized collocation and face-to-face communication. Others relied on phone conversations, documents, and electronic mail. Projects focusing on design quality relied on formal presentations and periodic review meetings. Projects emphasizing development speed required frequent, informal communications. Programs addressing design quality required extended product definition and performance testing, with input from design engineering, marketing, and customers. Efforts to reduce development time involved small, informal teams led by design engineers and managers. Aggressive product cost goals necessitated intensive interaction between product designers and manufacturing personnel. Highly innovative products required early supplier involvement and joint engineering problem solving. Formal design reviews and shared design data systems aided information sharing between internal and external design groups.     

Managing reverse logistics to enhance sustainability of industrial marketing

In this paper, a sustainable industrial marketing framework of latest requirement of green and sustainable operation is proposed. When literatures in strategy, marketing and operation have provided insight about the efficiency of reverse logistics and business value for the customer, the interrelationship is still under explored. This raises the question whether manufacturers could determine ecological friendly strategies to address their customer's environmental conscious needs and design the suitable solution to strike the balance between ecology and economics. Based on the case study of a medical product manufacturer, this study addresses this question by investigating how manufacturers identify the problem of reverse logistics; design and develop of sustainable product and service by enhancing the efficiency of operations, and market competencies that add value to their customers' business processes. Within the strategy for designing for effective reverse logistics, these findings contribute to understand the use of information system and technology for reverse logistics to enhance the customer's business process and provide value-added process for customer retention.     

New Product Development Structures: The Effect of Customer Overload on Post-Concept Time to Market

In corporate policy statements, seminars, journal articles—even in television commercials—the message comes through loud and clear: To remain competitive, we must do a better job of listening to our customers. Through close contact with customers, designers can more accurately identify market requirements, quickly refine product specifications, and thus reduce time to market. However, too much customer input can create confusion and duplication of effort, which ultimately increases time to market. In other words, some firms run the risk of over-listening to their customers. In a study of three global players in the electronic component industry, Srikant Datar, Clark Jordan, Sunder Kekre, Surendra Rajiv, and Kannan Srinivasan explore the effects of having too much input from customers. Specifically, they examine the relationship between a company's new product development structure and the volume of customer input, which in turn can affect time to market. The high-tech, fast-cycle firms examined in this study employ two distinct new product development structures: concentrated and distributed. A concentrated structure locates all product designers in one facility. This facilitates cross-product learning among designers, but limits designers' contact with customers and process engineers. A distributed structure disperses new product development among numerous manufacturing sites, giving designers close contact with customers and process engineers. However, a distributed structure limits designers' opportunities for cross-product learning. Analysis of 220 new product efforts reveals that the distributed structure offered a time-to-market advantage as long as these firms efficiently managed the level of customer interaction. When designers received input on the product design from no more than 25 customers, the distributed structure provided shorter time to market than the concentrated structure. Beyond the 25-customer level, time-to-market performance of the distributed structure degraded quickly and at an increasing rate. In such cases, more effective management of customer interaction might allow firms employing a distributed structure to enjoy the benefits not only of customer input, but also of improved coordination between product designers and process engineers.     

A Causal Model of the Impact of Skills, Synergy, and Design Sensitivity on New Product Performance

Notwithstanding the best efforts of outstanding managers, project team members, researchers, and consultants, no product development plan can guarantee success. Every new products organization will experience its fair share of failures, but a firm can take steps to ensure that its failures do not outweigh its successes. By benchmarking the competition, a firm can gain insight into best practices–the factors that lead most directly to new product success. To help identify these best practices, X. Michael Song, William E. Souder, and Barbara Dyer develop and test a causal model of the relationships among the key variables leading to new product performance. The proposed model identifies five factors that lead to marketing and technical proficiency: process skills, project management skills, alignment of skills with needs, team skills, and design sensitivity. According to the model, marketing and technical proficiency directly determine product quality, and ultimately lead to new product success or failure. The causal model was tested using information on 65 completed projects–34 successes and 31 failures–from 17 large, multi-divisional Japanese firms. The study participants develop, manufacture, and market high-technology consumer and industrial products. These firms judged the success or failure of the projects in this study by using seven criteria: return on investment, profit, market share, sales, opportunities for technical leadership, market dominance, and customer satisfaction. These firms generally assigned the greatest importance to customer satisfaction, opportunity creation, and long-term growth. For the most part, the responses from these firms support the relationships presented in the causal model. According to the respondents, marketing proficiency and product quality have a strong, positive influence on their new product performance, as do process skills, project management skills, and alignment of skills and needs. The responses highlight the importance to these firms of responsiveness to customer wants and needs, as well as ensuring a close fit between project needs and the firm's skills in marketing, R&D, engineering, and manufacturing. Somewhat surprisingly, the responses do not support the model's suggested relationships between skills/needs alignment and technical proficiency or between technical proficiency and product quality.     

Product Design Innovation and Customer Value: Cross‐Cultural Research in the United States and Korea

Innovation is one of the key drivers of success that a firm must utilize to develop a competitive advantage. The ability to innovate is especially important for a firm's survival in dynamic, changing environments. Customer demands are constantly changing, and more purchases are made when a firm's product design incorporates what customers perceive as cutting‐edge innovations. Satisfying customer demands is a distinct challenge for product designers because firms must develop a clear understanding of what aspects of design the customer wants. Although the importance of design has increased, very little research has been done to explain the relationship between product innovation and product design. Studies indicate that design innovation may create greater customer value through improvements in design value. Previous research has been limited and has not provided a clear concept of design innovation or defined the relationship between design innovation and marketing competencies. This paper seeks to offer a conceptual definition of design innovation, and to define the link between design innovation and marketing competencies. This paper utilizes cross‐cultural research to discover how these concepts differ due to cultural differences between the United States and Korea. This research contributes substantially to our understanding of the relationship between design innovation and customer value.     

How business customers judge customer success management

In business-to-business markets, customer success management is gaining growing practical importance. The concept comprises customer-related activities that aim at monitoring, securing and enhancing customer success as well as the implementation of the corresponding organizational structures and processes within the supplier firm. In contrast to existing research, this article takes a customer perspective to customer success management and investigates how business customers judge respective supplier activities; first, to reveal the quality dimensions business customers apply when assessing suppliers' customer success management activities, and second, to investigate how the quality of suppliers' customer success management activities leads to business customers' perceived value. Addressing these questions, this research contributes to literature by exploring customer success management from a customer perspective. The findings elucidate that customers' perceived value in use does not simply develop over time. Rather, through the implementation of customer-related activities of customer success management, suppliers can actively influence customers' value-in-use experiences thus fostering customers' rebuy decisions. From managerial perspective, the findings support suppliers in successfully shape their customer-oriented customer success management activities as well as the necessary internal structures and processes.     

Resourceful Sensemaking: Overcoming Barriers between Marketing and Design in NPD

New product development (NPD) success depends on the capacity of different functions to effectively collaborate. In particular, while recent studies have highlighted the importance of marketing and design working together, research suggests this relationship is often fraught with conflict due to different “thought worlds.” However, empirical research also identifies that the solution lies not in reducing the psychological distance between the two functions, but in the sensemaking practices used by designers and marketers to expand each other's understanding of the potential NPD solution. This process is known as resourceful sensemaking, and it refers to practitioners’ capacity to transform knowledge with the aim of expanding each other's horizons to ensure better team outcomes. Drawing on 71 interviews with designers and marketers in Australia and New Zealand, we examine how each function strategically deploys knowledge of the other to improve NPD outcomes. Building on the sensemaking literature, we demonstrate that while still drawing on different thought worlds, the inputs of both designers and marketers are necessary for effective NPD. We also identify that both are capable of creating a common framework of meaning through three resourceful sensemaking practices: exposing, co‐opting, and repurposing. Moreover, we identify the need for resourceful sensemaking that results in horizon‐expanding discourse among those involved in NPD. These practices are found to enable marketers and designers to expand the range of considerations and inputs into NPD; help organizations reconcile either/or dualisms; and lead them to identify unmet consumer needs, which result in the creation of innovative products. This paper thereby advances understanding of interfunctional coordination in NPD, integration of design into NPD, and sensemaking more broadly.     

Architectural Redesign, Interpersonal Communication, and Learning in R&D

An effective R&D organization needs information from a complex web of sources, including customers, suppliers, sales and marketing, and company management. Within the R&D organization, information must flow into and among numerous teams. This network of interpersonal communications can go a long way toward determining the success of a company's innovation efforts. In an exploratory study of a Belgian company operating in the telecommunications industry, Rudy K. Moenaert and Filip Caeldries examine the effects of interpersonal communication on market and technological learning in R&D. Trying to improve the flow of information into and within its R&D organization, this company designed its new R&D facility with an eye toward improving both market and technological learning throughout the organization. By locating R&D personnel in closer proximity to one another, management hoped to provide them with improved access to market and technological information, and thus increase their innovativeness. Contrary to expectations, placing R&D professionals in closer proximity to one another did not increase technological learning in this organization. In fact, technological learning actually decreased slightly during the period studied, though the change is not statistically significant. On the other hand, market learning and product innovativeness improved significantly during the period studied. For an R&D professional in this company, members of other R&D teams seem to be more important as sources of market information than as sources of technological information. Surprisingly, the relocation of R&D personnel also did not increase the amount of communication that takes place, either within a project team, between members of different teams, or between R&D professionals and the management steering committee. However, the architectural redesign does appear to have improved the quality of communication. R&D team leaders report that since the relocation, the information flowing into R&D has been more customer focused. This is attributed to the company's ongoing efforts to provide the tools and structures necessary for supporting the objectives of the architectural redesign. For example, implementation of quality function deployment (QFD) has helped innovation team members to focus more clearly on relevant information. The success of the architectural design required approaching this effort as a complex, ongoing process, rather than a quick-fix solution.     

Customer interactivity and new product performance: Moderating effects of product newness and product embeddedness

Understanding customer needs which drive significant product innovation is particularly challenging for new product development (NPD) organizations. Research has addressed how organizations benefit from interacting with customers, but more conceptualization is needed into the dimensions of the customer interaction process. In a business-to-business (B2B) setting, customer interactivity is conceptualized as a multi-dimensional construct consisting of bidirectional communications, participation, and joint problem solving during NPD projects. Drawing upon organizational information processing theory, customer interactivity is hypothesized to be positively related to customer information quality when developing highly innovative products, but not when developing modifications or extensions of existing products. Another condition affecting this relationship studied is the embeddedness of the new product in the customer's business environment. Customer interactivity is hypothesized to be positively related to information quality for highly embedded product, but not for low embedded product. Results from a sample of NPD organizations in several B2B industries support these hypotheses. The study contributes to the marketing literature and practice by identifying important dimensions of the customer interaction process which lead to more proactive organizations, and identifying two moderating conditions of the customer interactivity and NPD performance relationship.     

A Model of Supplier Integration into New Product Development*

In many industries, firms are looking for ways to cut concept‐to‐customer development time, to improve quality, and to reduce the cost of new products. One approach shown to be successful in Japanese organizations involves the integration of material suppliers early in the new product development cycle. This involvement may range from simple consultation with suppliers on design ideas to making suppliers fully responsible for the design of components or systems they will supply. While prior research shows the benefit of using this approach, execution remains a problem. The processes for identifying and integrating suppliers into the new product development (NPD) process in North American organizations are not understood well. This problem is compounded by the fact that design team members often are reluctant to listen to the technology and cost ideas made by suppliers in new product development efforts. We suggest a model of the key activities required for successful supplier integration into NPD projects, based on case studies with 17 Japanese and American manufacturing organizations. The model is validated using data from a survey of purchasing executives in global corporations with at least one successful and one unsuccessful supplier integration experience. The results suggest that (1) increased knowledge of a supplier is more likely to result in greater information sharing and involvement of the supplier in the product development process; (2) sharing of technology information results in higher levels of supplier involvement and improved outcomes; (3) supplier involvement on teams generally results in a higher achievement of NPD team goals; (4) in cases when technology uncertainty is present, suppliers and buyers are more likely to share information on NPD teams; and (5) the problems associated with technology uncertainty can be mitigated by greater use of technology sharing and direct supplier participation on new product development teams. A supplier's participation as a true member of a new product development team seems to result in the highest level of benefits, especially in cases when a technology is in its formative stages.     

Seller–Buyer Interactions During the Commercialization of Technological Process Innovations

For buyers and sellers alike, high-tech process innovations can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, technological process innovations (e.g., computer hardware and software, factory automation equipment) offer buyers the potential for reduced production costs and enhanced product quality. However, early adoption of such innovations is often a risky proposition. For the seller, successful commercialization requires stimulating not only adoption, but also successful implementation of the innovation. In other words, effective management of seller—buyer relations during the development and commercialization process go a long way toward determining the success of a high-tech process innovation. Gerard A. Athaide, Patricia W. Meyers, and David L. Wilemon examine the relationship marketing activities employed by successful sellers of high-tech process innovations. They identify eight strategic marketing objectives that underlie these relationship marketing activities: product customization, information gathering on product performance, product education and training, ongoing product support, proactive political involvement (to encourage support for the innovation from the various affected parties in the buyer's organization), product demonstration and trial, real-time problem-solving assistance, and clarification of the product's relative advantage. Their findings suggest that successful sellers engage in relationship marketing activities throughout all phases of the commercialization process. Rather than simply trying to close a deal, these firms seek active involvement from potential customers, ranging from codesigning of products to seeking feedback on product-related problems or desired modifications. This broader scope of customer involvement necessitates cooperation among various groups in the seller's organization. Product development and engineering work closely with the customer during product customization. Those groups must communicate effectively with the salespeople who demonstrate the product and with the customer support people who obtain feedback and provide real-time problem-solving support. In other words, these relationship marketing activities cut across functional barriers. Consequently, a clear understanding of the buyer's needs and environment is essential throughout the seller's organization, not just in the sales and marketing departments.     

Bidirectional Information Transfer: An Imperative for Network and Marketing Integration in a Canadian Telecommunications Firm

Market intelligence helps ensure that R&D efforts are focused on customer needs. In turn, R&D supplies the information necessary for gaining competitive advantage through advances in product and process technology. However, improved R&D–marketing integration means more than simply involving additional marketing personnel in product development. We must focus on identifying and achieving the desired level of integration. Jozée Lapierre and Brigitte Hénault present the results of a study examining the R&D–marketing interface in a large Canadian telecommunications company. Their study explores managers' perceptions of interfunctional integration during the planning and implementation of new services. The goal of this study is to identify the critical integration areas and managers' satisfaction with the organization's current level of integration. Network (i.e., technical) and marketing managers differ substantially in their perceptions of the required level of integration. However, they agree on the five most important areas of interfunctional integration: marketing involvement in establishing service development schedules; information transfer from marketing to network on competitors' moves; information transfer from marketing to network on customer requirements for new services; information transfer from network to marketing on network availability for providing evolved services; and information transfer from network to marketing on network restrictions affecting performance, after-sales servicing levels, and service pricing. In other words, network and marketing managers view information transfer between their groups as requiring the highest integration level. Both groups agree that their budgeting activities do not require as much integration as other activities. Managers from both groups are generally dissatisfied with the current level of interfunctional integration. Marketing managers are far more dissatisfied than network managers in most areas of integration explored in this study. However, network managers are more dissatisfied than their marketing colleagues in all areas involving the transfer of information from marketing to network.     

More effective sales force reporting

As the need for marketing intelligence by sales and marketing managers grows more essential, field sales personnel are increasingly being asked to gather and report information. Many executives realize the potential value of using salespersons to supply information useful to management decision making. The sales force is familiar with their territories, their customers' needs and sources of information inside customer organizations, their competitors' marketing activities, and trends in product acceptance. The incremental costs and effort required are low compared to other research methods, since information can be submitted within the context of a regular call report system [2, 6, 8].But salespersons have been found to be inadequate and uncooperative reporters in many instances. Numerous field salespersons believe that reporting infringes on their primary responsibility of selling, and furthermore that management apparently doesn't make use of the resulting information anyway. Thus, while salespersons have access to a wealth of marketing information of potentially great value to the firm, they are often inadequate, unreliable, and unmotivated reporters [4, 5].This article reports the results of a study designed to investigate what management practices contribute to, or detract from, effective reporting of marketing information by salespersons. Current practices in reporting are noted and some recommendations are made to help management improve sales force reporting.     

Two Sides of the Same Coin: How Do Different Dimensions of Product Program Innovativeness Affect Customer Loyalty?

Conventional wisdom holds that innovativeness has essentially positive performance implications. However, empirical research reveals mixed findings regarding customer‐related responses to innovation, as distinct dimensions—such as product newness and meaningfulness—may generate responses in different manners. This study introduces a multidimensional conceptualization of innovativeness at the program level, thereby enlarging the customary perspective by considering both positive and negative customer responses to innovativeness. Drawing on information economics, this study suggests that product program meaningfulness fosters customer loyalty, whereas product program newness undermines customer loyalty. In addition, the study examines mechanisms that might buffer the negative newness–loyalty relationship and explores enablers of the positive meaningfulness–loyalty effect by considering a brand's association with innovativeness and customer integration. Empirical support for the proposed effects comes from a multi‐industry sample with 180 triadic cases from business‐to‐business companies, which includes assessments from marketing, and research and development managers as well as customers. Moderated regression analysis was applied to test the hypotheses. The results indicate a negative effect of product program newness on customer loyalty and a positive effect of product program meaningfulness. Further, a brand's close association with innovativeness reduces the negative effect of product newness, and integrating customers into the value‐creating process fosters the loyalty effect of product meaningfulness. This study offers a potential explanation for the ambiguity created by equivocal empirical results regarding customer responses to innovativeness. The study also shows that offering more innovations does not necessarily make customers loyal. Instead, managers should mitigate the negative effects of product program newness.     

Customer-Driven Product Development Through Quality Function Deployment in the U.S. and Japan

Quality Function Deployment is a tool for bringing the voice of the customer into the product development process from conceptual design through to manufacturing. It begins with a matrix that links customer desires to product engineering requirements, along with competitive benchmarking information, and further matrices can be used to ultimately link this to design of the manufacturing system. Unlike other methods originally developed in the U.S. and transferred to Japan, the QFD methodology was born out of Total Quality Control (TQC) activities in Japan during the 1960s and has been transferred to companies in the U.S. This article reports on the results of a 1995 survey of more than 400 companies in the U.S. and Japan using QFD. The research questions investigated in this study were developed both inductively from QFD case studies in the U.S. and Japan and deductively from the literature. The reported results are in part counterintuitive. The U.S. companies reported a higher degree of usage, management support, cross‐functional involvement, use of QFD driven data sources, and perceived benefits from using QFD. For the most part, the main uses of QFD in the U.S. were restricted to the first matrix (“House of Quality”) that links customer requirements to product engineering requirements and rarely was this carried forward to later matrices. U.S. companies were more apt to use newly collected customer data sources (e.g., focus groups) and methods for analyzing customer requirements. Japanese companies reported using existing product data (e.g., warranty) and a broader set of matrices to a greater extent. The use of analytical techniques in conjunction with QFD (e.g., simulation, design of experiments, regression, mathematical target setting, and analytic hierarchy process) was not wide spread in either country. U.S. companies were more likely to report benefits of QFD in improving cross‐functional integration and better decision‐making processes compared to Japanese companies. Possible reasons for these cross‐national differences as well as their implications are discussed.     

Interactive strategy formation: Organizational and entrepreneurial factors related to effective customer information systems practices in B2B firms

Interactive marketing requires that a firm learn about its customers and remember what the customer has said to personalize communications and customize product offerings to those customers. This type of marketing requires that customer information be actively managed because information from and about the customer is the core of marketing decision-making. In-depth interviews with 17 managers in five firms identified specific organizational and entrepreneurial factors pertinent to the strategic management of customer information. The research suggests that interactive marketing require a company that can itself be interactive with its internal and external environment to create strategies that can succeed in a changing environment.One exemplary company was compared to four others to uncover organizational issues and processes leading to effective management of customer information. Using the Resource-Based View and the importance of the effective management of intangible assets as its starting point, this research illuminated the processes involved with collecting and disseminating information and highlighted the firms' struggle with issues of inter-functional conflict. Perhaps most importantly, from a strategy-formation point of view, customer-centric strategies related to customer information management were found to be developed interactively, as a dialogue between middle and upper management, using customer data and competitive trends.     

Effectual and causal reasoning in the adoption of marketing automation

Research on technology adoption in organizations traditionally assumes that these organizations follow rational, strategic and planned adoption processes. However, a gradually emerging view is that the adoption of technology is also characterized by entrepreneurial or effectual reasoning, primarily due to technological and market uncertainties that call for more agile and experimental approaches at the digital age. Drawing on effectuation theory, we develop a research framework to examine the managerial reasoning during the adoption of marketing automation technology. Based on the results of a comparative multiple-case study on four large-sized industrial firms, we develop a maturity model of marketing automation adoption and show that even large-sized B2B companies apply effectual reasoning, which problematizes the rationality assumption in the technology adoption literature. Second, we show that during the adoption process, organizations' dominant reasoning mode follows an iterative pattern in which the adopting organization moves back and forth between effectuation and causation. Finally, we identify five key domains of marketing automation (customer knowledge, information systems infrastructure, analytics, interdepartmental dynamics and change management) and describe their gradual evolution at different stages of the adoption process.     

High‐Performance Product Management: The Impact of Structure,Process, Competencies,and Role Definition*

Product management is one of the most important functions in marketing. Yet the product management literature has focused largely on creating successful products and has relatively little to say about creating effective product management organizations. This paper focuses on the organizational determinants of high‐performance product management at three levels: (1) the product manager as an individual; (2) the marketing processes related to product management; and (3) the organization structure and role definition. The paper identifies several key factors that potentially impact product management performance. A set of qualitative interviews is conducted to develop hypotheses related to constructs that may drive product management performance. These hypotheses are used to develop a causal model for product management performance that includes constructs related to roles and responsibilities, organization structure, and marketing processes related to product management. An empirical survey of 198 product managers from a variety of industries is conducted to test the causal model. The results of the causal model suggest that performance of a product management organization is driven by structural barriers in the organization, the quality of marketing processes, roles and responsibilities, and knowledge and competencies. The findings suggest that structural boundaries and interfaces are the biggest impediment to effective product management, followed by clarity of roles and responsibilities. The research highlights the importance of organization structure and effective human resource practices in improving product management performance.     

COST,QUALITY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL TRADEOFFS FOR PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD ASSEMBLY

After exhausting all “pollution prevention pays” opportunities, further efforts towards environmental protection often engender some type of cost to the manufacturer. Then, designers must weigh tradeoffs between environmental impacts and equally pressing needs to reduce costs, improve product quality, and reduce cycle time: all while meeting customer demands, which are the driving force behind the design process. Although there is a growing market for “green” products as customers' desire to be environmentally responsible increases, it is extremely difficult to accurately assess the customer's actual willingness to pay for environmental protection. This paper first briefly reviews methods for assessing customer preferences. Then, it presents a decision model for use by design engineers to assist in making these tradeoffs between cost, quality, and environmental impact in which customer preferences can be reflected in weighting factors assigned by the design engineer. Qualitative HOQ information is used as a starting point to derive a mathematical programming formulation for multiobjective optimization. Finally, an illustrative example for printed circuit board assembly is provided.     

Design,Meanings, and Radical Innovation: A Metamodel and a Research Agenda*

Recent studies on design management have helped us to better comprehend how companies can apply design to get closer to users and to better understand their needs; this is an approach usually referred to as user‐centered design. Yet analysis of design‐intensive manufacturers such as Alessi, Artemide, and other leading Italian firms shows that their innovation process hardly starts from a close observation of user needs and requirements. Rather, they follow a different strategy called design‐driven innovation in this paper. This strategy aims at radically change the emotional and symbolic content of products (i.e., their meanings and languages) through a deep understanding of broader changes in society, culture, and technology. Rather than being pulled by user requirements, design‐driven innovation is pushed by a firm's vision about possible new product meanings and languages that could diffuse in society. Design‐driven innovation, which plays such a crucial role in the innovation strategy of design intensive firms, has still remained largely unexplored. This paper aims at providing a possible direction to fill this empty spot in innovation management literature. In particular, first it proposes a metamodel for investigating design‐driven innovation in which a manufacturer's ability to understand, anticipate, and influence emergence of new product meanings is built by relying on external interpreters (e.g., designers, firms in other industries, suppliers, schools, artists, the media) that share its same problem: to understand the evolution of sociocultural models and to propose new visions and meanings. Managing design‐driven innovation therefore implies managing the interaction with these interpreters to access, share, and internalize knowledge on product languages and to influence shifts in sociocultural models. Second, the paper proposes a possible direction to scientifically investigate the management of this networked and collective research process. In particular, it shows that the process of creating breakthrough innovations of meanings partially mirrors the process of creating breakthrough technological innovations. Studies of design‐driven innovation may therefore benefit significantly from the existing body of theories in the field of technology management. The analysis of the analogies between these two types of radical innovations (i.e., meanings and technologies) allows a research agenda to be set for exploration of design‐driven innovation, a relevant as well as underinvestigated phenomenon.