ID 462 Design Management Annotation

Endüstriyel Tasarım, Teknolojik Yenilik, AR-GE

In this annotation, I am going to talk about the article “Endüstriyel Tasarım,

Teknolojik Yenilik, AR-GE” written by Özlem Er. Article has points about Contribution of
Design to Competitiveness and Relationship between Design, Innovation and R&D.
OECD (1982) considers design as the center of the innovation process, that is, the
point at which a new product is envisioned, developed and transformed into a
prototype. Design is the central element of this process called New Product
Development (Er & Er, 2000). R&D can always be applied and used as a form of problem
solving. Good product design is one of the ways companies can improve their
competitiveness. On this point I agree with article. There are bunch of examples for this,
like car market and phone market. In the market there is bunch of brands that has been
releasing new model phones. There are plenty of things that a customer can think while
buying new phone but other than some technical features the design of the phone
makes customer to buy the phone. The size or the color can sometimes be the star
selling point of product. Moreover to this, incremental innovations and design
improvements are often the basis for new product development for many companies.
Most of the product designs are based on previous inventions or innovations. So, design
is more comprehensive than invention and innovation. Hansen and Serin (1997) draw
attention to the fact that low-tech products are also undergoing an innovation process,
although they do not have a separate R&D function and criticize the identification of
technological development with R&D and the view of differentiated R&D functions as
the source of innovation processes, says article. To my way of thinking R&D is very
important. Design needs it, to make something that needed in market. To designing
something that fits to the market, to sell products to customers R&D takes part in design
process. Every sector needs R&D in their design process. Design is not just a thing that
pleasing the eye, it covers the conceptual, visual, functional and even cognitive
construction of the user-product relationship beyond the narrow aesthetic appearance
of the product (Er, H. A., 1997). R&D is not something that only sector or designer needs,
even customers need R&D.
On the whole, article mentions the importance and relation in between R&D and
design. Design needs R&D and R&D is very important.

References
Er, Ö. (2001). “Endüstriyel Tasarım, Teknolojik Yenilik, AR-GE: Türkiye’deki Mevcut
Teşvik Uygulamalarında Endüstriyel Tasarımın Yeri ve Politika Önerileri” (Industrial
Design, Technological Innovation and R&D: The Position of Industrial Design in the
Existing Incentive Mechanisms in Turkey and Policy Proposals), ERC/METU International
Conference in Economics V Proceedings and Conference CD-ROM, 10-13 September
2001, Ankara.