International product design awards: the nature and strategic use

Abstract

This research aims to establish the nature of international product design award schemes and their strategic use for manufacturing companies. Although these aims are critical for understanding and utilizing international product design awards, an extensive literature review revealed that these aims have not been previously studied in detail. A critical study of literature revealed that the design awards became a business model with much interest in profit generation, supported by many different benefit seekers who regarded participating in the awards as an investment. The research has identified four major roles of design awards: 1) reputation; 2) stimulus; 3) contributor to running design department; 4) recruitment aid. Currently, companies simply add up the number of awards won to demonstrate their design prowess. How-ever, a detailed comparative analysis of four major design award schemes (IDEA, IF PDA, Red Dot PDA, JGDA) revealed that this method resulted in a distorted presentation of the companies’ design achievement. Therefore, a qualitative method, named ‘Design Award Quality Index’ with weighted values was developed according to the selectiveness of different types of prizes as well as different award schemes for accuracy. The research has found eight different purposes for entering the awards and seventeen impacts resulted from the purposes. The findings of the survey analysis showed that the external purposes could cause both ex-ternal and internal impacts and vice-versa. This implies that when planning for entering a design award, these cross-effects should be considered. The research has also found that the companies entering into the awards could be classified into four types by their purposes of participation according to the extent to which either internal or external purposes are pur-sued: 1) high external ?? high internal; 2) high external ?? low internal; 3) low external ?? high internal; 4) low external ?? low internal. The first three t...