The Design of a Networked Product by a Network of Product Designers the Design and Implementation of Services Delivered Across a Network is a New Art…

Abstract

Products and services containing hardware and software that are delivered across a network are expensive to design and carry a particularly high risk when new markets are being created in a highly competitive, global marketplace. The design and implementation of such systems in a competitive industrial environment is a relatively new art that requires distinctive skills. The rate of change in the market is so high that the resulting time pressures are changing design-to-market processes in traditional industries. Our interest is in Telecommunication Network-based Services (TNSs), a term used to describe a range of different services that rely on additions to a general communication network, such as the public telephone system, to deliver added value in the form of new products. Resulting from in-depth studies we report the design of a remote meter-reading system across a network of competing and collaborating companies. We comment on the way in which design-to-market processes are changing in our collaborating company to become more like those design processes that take place over shorter time scales in agile, responsive companies in other industrial sectors.We use the results of our analysis of records and semi-structured interview data to assess different theoretical frameworks for understanding innovation in networked products designed across company boundaries. We emphasize complexity and uncertainty across an unusually broad cultural spectrum as the identifying characteristics of TNS design and suggest that an evolutionary analogy offers the most promising theoretical framework for understanding design in this field of endeavour.