Best Paper Award for FEB researcher Jaap Wieringa

The paper What About Design Newness? Investigating the Relevance of a Neglected Dimension of Product Innovativeness has won the Thomas P. Hustad Award for the best paper published in Journal of Product Innovation Management in 2009. FEB researcher Jaap Wieringa co-authored this paper with Katrin Talke (University of Hamburg), Søren Salomo (Danish Technical University in Copenhagen), and Antje Lutz.

The award was presented at the research forum of the 34th annual global PDMA conference on Product Innovation Management, which was held in Orlando (USA), from October 16-20, 2010.

The importance of design in innovation

The winning paper investigates the influence of design on the success of innovations. In several industries, new products are very similar in functional features but compete on their unique design. Firms like Alessi, Apple, Bang & Olufsen, Dyson, or Kartell all follow a design-driven innovation approach and use their products’ visual appearance as the main mean for differentiation. In spite of this, design newness is never discussed among the dimensions of product innovativeness. This paper seeks to build an argument for why design newness should be considered as a dimension of product innovativeness. In addition to providing conceptual rationale, empirical evidence is offered on the influence of design newness on sales performance across a product’s life cycle.

For management practice, the findings emphasize the importance of overall product innovativeness, clarify the different performance effects of design and technical newness across the product life cycle, and show the value of creating a unique visual product appearance to positively trigger product diffusion.

More information

Katrin Talke, Søren Salomo, Jaap E. Wieringa, and Antje Lutz (2009), What about Design Newness? Investigating the Relevance of a Neglected Dimension of Product Innovativeness, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 26, 601-615.

Contact: Dr. Jaap Wieringa, tel. +31 50 363 7093, J.E.Wieringa rug.nl .