The Influence of Strategic Agility on Product Design Organizations’ Operations and Cultures

Abstract

Responding to the uncertainties in a more volatile and ever-changing external environment, in recent years concepts, such as strategic agility, have been introduced in the management field to improve the flexibility and effectiveness of internal decision-making in an enterprise and to promote the performance of new product development while maintaining product innovation. However, compared with the business model innovation, few studies in the management field focus on product design and development, which is an area that emphasizes practice and strategy execution. Therefore, this study discusses the key considerations of early-stage development decisions analyzed in the existing literature on strategic agility and combines these key considerations with the theory of design strategy, which has a key impact on new product development performance, in order to explore the relationships between them. Based on an empirical analysis of 130 manufacturing industry firms, strategic agility was found to have a complete mediating effect between design strategy and new product development performance as well as a positive impact on design strategy operation. The preliminary model established in this study suggests that design and development organizations can use more flexible and elastic decision-making mechanisms to cope with the rapidly changing external environment. This study has theoretical significance for the development of design strategy research and has practical significance for the management of product design organizations under the current chaotic environment.