Effects of designer involvement in the new product development process: Evidence from Japanese manufacturing companies

As the strategic importance of design in firms has increased, design is no longer understood merely as product aesthetics or styling, but as a professional function that influences the entire new product development (NPD) process through the translation of user knowledge, meaning creation, and visualization and prototyping. Prior research has repeatedly emphasized the value of designers’ early and sustained involvement in NPD. However, given that NPD unfolds as a staged process under time and cost constraints, it is not self-evident through which outcome pathways designer involvement ultimately translates into business performance. In particular, theoretical frameworks and quantitative evidence remain limited that systematically distinguish between product innovativeness and development efficiency as distinct outcome dimensions and compare the effects of stage-specific designer involvement across them. This study bridges two largely parallel research streams—designer involvement research and concurrent engineering (CE)—by reframing designer involvement in NPD as an actor-specific resource allocation problem: at which stage, and to what extent, should professional design resources be deployed. Using project-level data from Japanese manufacturing firms, the study simultaneously measures designers’ involvement intensity at three NPD stages—market research and analysis, idea and concept development, and engineering and prototyping—and examines how such involvement affects business performance through product innovativeness and development efficiency, employing structural equation modeling. The results show that designer involvement does not operate through a single performance pathway; rather, its value creation differs by stage and by outcome dimension. Moreover, the stage at which designer involvement exerts the greatest leverage shifts depending on market uncertainty. These findings challenge uniform prescriptions that advocate front-loading designer involvement and instead offer a theoretical reconceptualization of design in NPD as a dynamic and context-dependent allocation of professional resources that mediates the tension between innovativeness and efficiency.