The Process Mechanism Of Design-based Innovation

Technological innovation is essential to enterprises' sustainable development, which is also the core strategy of most enterprises. While, enterprises in China make their way out of the predicament of low-tech, low-price and low value-add.They can not prevent themselves from technology homogeneous and product appearance similarity. One of the most important reasons is that they hasn't combine technological innovation with design.International design leader enterprises like Apple, Alessi have found another way of product design innovation, brought social culture into product innovation process, which has increased the value-added of innovation and enterprises' competitive advantage greatly.This paper proposed new concept of design-based innovation and constructed the process mechanism of design-based innovation on the basis of literature review about design driven innovation, product semantic, and organizational learning and interview of several enterprises excellent in design. This paper deepened and extended the content of design driven innovation by addressing following questions:(1) what is design-based innovation; (2) its impact on enterprise's innovation performance; and (3) how. The knowledge acquisition process was defined as learning according to organizational learning theory, and this paper proposed social-cultural learning and technological learning according to learning content. Innovation capability was chosen as mediator, which was divided into technology capability, connotation capability and denotation capability based on design innovation theory and product semantic theory. We used learning behaviour-innovation capability-performance framework to explore the relationship between variables.We investigated 196 related companies and achieved following conclusions though statistical analysis like factor analysis, regression analysis, variance analysis and structural equation modeling:(1) all of exogenous variables(social-cultural learning and technological learning) and mediator variables(technology capability, connotation capability and denotation capability) have significant positive effect on endogenous variable(innovation performance), in which connotation capability has the greatest impact on innovation performance, followed by technology capability and denotation capability; (2) technological learning does not affect innovation performance directly, but is fully mediated by technology capability and denotation capability. Similarly, technology capability does not affect innovation performance directly, but is fully mediated by denotation capability and connotation capability; (3) social-cultural learning has direct influence on innovation, which is also partly mediated by denotation capability; (4) The design-based innovation process is a double-learning system which emphasizes the interplay between social-cultural learning and technological learning, so as to amplify the influence on innovation performance. And the more volatile the environment, the impact technological learning placed on innovation performance will more significant. The more stable the environment, the impact social-cultural learning placed on innovation performance will more significant.This paper has made several theoretical contributions as follows:First, this paper proposed process mechanism of design-based innovation which strengthen the interplay between product meaning and technology, deepened and expanded design driven innovation theory whose process model constituted by three steps:listening, interpretation and addressing and emphasized product meaning innovation.Second, this paper defined social-cultural learning as the process of social-cultural knowledge acquisition and user message extraction as social-cultural learning according to the concept of technological learning, and measured it from knowledge characteristic, learning path and learning subject.Third, design-based innovation capability was divided into denotation capability, connotation capability and technology capability according to product semantic theory.