Is Good Design Good Business?

Gorm Gabrielsen, Kjell Grønhaug, Lynn Kahle, Tore Kristensen, Thomas Plenborg and Ricky Wilke

Chapter 10 in Industrial Design, Competition and Globalization, 2010, pp 220-241 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract IBM CEO Tom Watson made the claim, that ‘Good design is Good Business’ at one of the first Aspen conferences on design in the 1950s (Watson and Petre, 1991). It seems generally accepted, that companies such as Apple, Alessi and SONY have gained competitive advantages from design (Dumas and Mintzberg, 1989; Kotler and Rath, 1988). Books like ‘Winning by Design’ (Walsh et al. 1992) and magazines like Business Week and newspapers such as the Financial Times have promoted the claim that investment in design as well as simply using good design enhances the competitiveness of firms. With a few notable exceptions (Blaich and Blaich, 1993; Gemser and Leenders 2001; Hertenstein, Platt and Veryzer, 2005), however, there is very limited evidence for such claims. In addition the concept of design is not well-defined and is often regarded as a superficial and superfluous fashion.

Keywords: Product Design; Good Design; Business Performance; Corporate Financial Performance; Good Business (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-27403-7_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230274037

DOI: 10.1057/9780230274037_10

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().