Design and design management in the incubation phase of high-tech start-ups

Abstract

Because engineers founding start-ups often lack access to financial resources, engineers and designers rarely cooperate during incubation phase. Engineers also know little about the potential benefits of cooperating with designers, although design is increasingly seen as a method of incubating business ideas and creating new, unique and novel approaches.–To investigate the contributions and effects of design and design management a research team worked in an action research project with six high-tech start-ups from various fields. All start-ups were from the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. This paper introduces a framework that was used during data collection and data analysis to tie the results of collaboration to generalizable insights. There is evidence that design and design management are able to professionalise and foster and accelerate the start-up’s access to network resources such as finances, reputation, and market.