Industry-University Collaborative Innovation in New Product Development ----Take Design Research Institute for Example KEYWORDS : Design knowledge, collaborative innovation, industry-university engagement For a long period of time, there is fail in the combination between technology, education and economy, which leads to low efficiency in distribution of innovation resources and lack of internal force of industrial development in China. Industry-university collaborative innovation is an effective way of resources distribution and knowledge management, which improves national core competitiveness and social economic development.
Name / Surname
Sun Jian
Industrial design is a discipline that has the potential to develop innovative outcomes in new product development project conducted in academia or industry by design researchers and practitioners. In academia it is mainly concerned with research-led industrial design while in industry it is more concerned with practice-led industrial design. It is an emerging
Research field/area
Collaborative innovation & design as intervention in business context
tendency that many collaborative centers have been built around the globe, as there is a call for academic design research to find direct industry relevance to a broader community for commercial and social benefit. However, no research theory is around how design research could influence industry-university engagement in new product development. Another knowledge gap exists in the relationship between design research and design practice has been a long debated
Supervisor
topic. Through out history, design research has gone through several processes such as systematic research, empirical
Prof. Yang Jianming
research, reflective action and constructive research. The theory of research-led design practice tries to amplify the im-
Prof. Blair Kuys
portance of practice and demonstrate the leading role of design research. However, this theory does not have thorough demonstration. After identify research gaps, this research review literature around organizational capabilities, resource-based view of firm (RBV) and knowledge management (KM), which narrow down research focus into following questions: •
How design research leads resources allocation and transfer in new product development within the context of or-
ganizations? • yr1
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yr5
How research-led design practice used as an approach (analyst) to evolve a project during the whole product devel-
opment process? •
How design practice used as reflection as research outcome and knowledge communication and leads to new re-
search questions? In the empirical research, this research uses a "mixed research design" pattern, which comprises the questionnaires, interviews and case study. To begin with, interviews are used to identify company resources that closely related to design-led innovation performance of organizations. Combined with case study, conclusions with conceptual models of collaborative innovation framework between industry and university. Afterwards, theoretical models are elaborated on knowledge and resources transfer and research led design process and the corresponding hypotheses had been put forward after theoretic analysis. These hypotheses are then validated through large-scale questionnaires and statistics analysis. In the last part, new theories are utilized in organizational construction of design research institute of School of Design and Art in Beijing Institute of Technology, which is an essential platform of industry-university collaborative innovation. Theoretical framework can be put into practice to inform collaboration with industry and guide design research activities. On this stage, the case is used to verify theoretical models