Analyzing Internal Stakeholders’ Salience in Product Development

Abstract

Many companies apply Design for X principles to consider production and product lifecycle cost implications in the early phase of product development. In these companies, representatives of different Design for X disciplines form a specific group of internal stakeholders. This single case study constructs a stakeholder salience assessment framework and uses the framework to analyze internal stakeholders’ salience in product development in the case company. As the main result, the compared stakeholders are sequenced and their relative saliences are valued and visualized. In that single case, product management representatives perceived Design for Testing as clearly the most salient stakeholder being four times more salient than Design for Packaging. The framework and assessment procedure are applicable to use in other contexts and companies. This study exemplifies usage of the framework but the results are not generalizable. After salience assessment a company may take corrective actions to increase or decrease the salience of specific stakeholder group, to disband an internal stakeholder group, to consolidate some stakeholder groups together, or to segregate a Design for X group into several groups. The novel approach of this study is to apply the stakeholder salience assessment framework in product development context.