Products combine function and form. This paper focuses on product form. We combine state-of-the-art clustering techniques with experimental validation to identify styles (groupings of new product designs of similar form) among the more than 350,000 U.S. design patents granted from 1977 through 2010. Thus we compile, for the first time, a rich data set of styles that can serve as an empirical platform for a rigorous study of the role played by product form in new product development. Building on this platform, we analyze the determinants of “style turbulence”—the year-to-year unpredictability of changes in a style’s prevalence. We find that (i) style turbulence follows a U-shaped relationship with respect to function turbulence (the turbulence of product functions associated with a given style), and (ii) style turbulence increases over time. We discuss the implications of these findings for managing design in new product development. Data and the e-companion are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2653 . This paper was accepted by David Hsu, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Problem definition : Is teamwork better than working alone for creating breakthrough inventions? We challenge the widely accepted affirmative answer to this question. Academic/practical relevance : Extant research has consistently found that lone inventors significantly underperform teams in creating breakthroughs; thus it extols the benefits of teamwork while neglecting the role of single inventors. This paper offers an important counterweight to those empirical results by identifying a fundamental contingency under which teams might or might not outperform lone inventors: the degree of decomposability of the invention. By ignoring this contingency, past literature has systematically underestimated the role that lone inventors can play for companies. Methodology : We use utility and design patent data for 1985–2009 to compare the effect—on the probability of creating a breakthrough—of working alone versus working with a team. Results : For utility patents, we do find that working alone reduces the likelihood of achieving a breakthrough. Yet this disadvantage of lone inventors is not evident for design patents. We theorize that the nearly nondecomposable nature of design is a major factor contributing to lone designers’ relative efficacy of achieving breakthroughs. This theory is then tested in the context of utility patents, where we can observe variation in inventions’ decomposability. We find that technology inventions that are difficult to decompose also relatively advantage lone inventors compared with teams, and we demonstrate that this finding reflects greater coordination costs when such inventions are attempted by teams. If one takes a myopic view of collaboration’s role, then our results suggest that working with others does not help develop outstanding nondecomposable inventions. Yet taking a long-term view reveals that lone inventors benefit more than do teams from having collaborated with others in the past. In fact, we find that past collaborations can help lone inventors outperform teams with regard to developing nondecomposable inventions. Managerial implications : Past research has suggested that collaboration is universally beneficial in creating breakthrough inventions. However, such efforts have ignored crucial contingencies: we show why inventors should explicitly consider both the targeted invention’s decomposability and their own history of collaboration when deciding whether or not to work with a team on a given innovation.

A new design can be compared with its contemporaries or older designs. In this study, we argue that the temporal distance between the new design and its comparison play an important role in understanding how a new design’s similarity with other designs contributes to its valuation. Construing the value of designs as a combination of their informational value and their expressive value, we propose the “anchored differentiation” hypothesis. Specifically, we argue that expressive value (which is enhanced by how much the new design appears different from others) is emphasized more than informational value (which is enhanced by how much the new design appears similar to others) compared with contemporary designs. Informational value, however, is emphasized more than expressive value when compared against designs from the past. Therefore, both difference from other contemporary designs (contemporary differentiation) and similarity to other past designs (past anchoring) help increase the value of a new design. We find consistent evidence for our theory across both a field study and an experimental study. Furthermore, we show that this is because temporal distance changes the relative emphasis on expressive and informational values. We discuss our contribution to the growing literature on optimal distinctiveness and design innovation by offering a dynamic perspective that helps resolve the tension between similarities and differences in evaluating new designs.

Contracting in medical equipment maintenance services: An empirical investigation

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