Abstract
Design firms have been changing to become innovation consulting agencies, while business companies are improving their use of design innovation capacity for innovative problem-solving approaches. This study aims to identify how the organizational resource components of design firms affect the competitiveness of design outsourcing through the medium of absorptive capacity, innovation capacity, and design innovativeness. To do this, a total of 389 surveys from employees of design firms of seven regions in Korea were collected and analyzed. The analysis results show that tangible and human resource have a significant impact on absorptive capacity and innovation capacity, and intangible resource do the same on absorptive capacity. It was found that intangible resource would not have a significant impact on innovation capacity. This indicates that design firms should also prioritize fostering creative talent and strengthening financial and physical support for organizational activities. In addition, this study confirmed that enhanced absorptive capacity within the organization has a positive effect on the design innovativeness, and that the resource and capacity management of design firms are important to improve design innovativeness and outsourcing competitiveness.
Highlights
Since the design paradigm changed due to the spread of integrated and balanced thinking in the 21st century, design has evolved into an activity that creates experiences and leads to strategic innovation in enterprises
Three factors such as tangible resources, human resources, and intangible resources were set up, which are the components of the organizational resources of a design firm
The analysis by Korean design firms showed that the tangible resource, human resource, and intangible resource of design firms all affected absorptive capacity and, among the organizational resource components, the tangible and human resource affected the innovation capacity, while the intangible resource did not affect it
Summary
Since the design paradigm changed due to the spread of integrated and balanced thinking in the 21st century, design has evolved into an activity that creates experiences and leads to strategic innovation in enterprises. In the case of design firms, their business form has moved away from the design styling service-oriented work of creating and providing design drafts, according to client needs in the past, into a form of innovative consulting that establishes design strategies and supports client companies’ innovation [1]. As the form of the design business expands away from design development-oriented tasks to overall management activities covering planning, research, development, and distribution, the capabilities of design firms are required to apply knowledge and methodologies in various fields and to strengthen their design innovativeness capacity to solve innovative problems [2]. Innovativeness is the willingness to go beyond the best of current conditions and the pursuit of new opportunities, such as introducing new ideas from established practices and trying to do more than businesses currently in place, with design creativity acting as differentiated innovativeness for companies that are required to innovate [3]. Design competitiveness is an important factor in a company’s strategy to develop innovative products to meet new market needs and develop new products that are ahead of the trend as the development of consumer-tailored products is expanded through a variety of small-volume production systems triggered by the Fourth Industrial
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