Trends indicate that design expertise is increasingly outsourced by companies. A fresh and creative input by external designers can be highly valuable for innovation and business success. Surprisingly, however, few firms have fully exploited the business potential of design investment. One approach to build up and leverage design expertise would be to establish a strategic alliance with an external design resource to supply a constant flow of fresh ideas and insights to enhance product development and innovation. A conceptual framework delineates both the main advantages and challenges of design alliances and links this with the resource-based perspective of strategic management. Three company cases are compared to explore how innovation and advances in industrial design may occur through a design alliance.
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Jevnaker et al. (1998) studied this question.
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