Influences of pressure on cooperative product development

Abstract

This paper looks at a decisive influencing factor in cooperative product development, ‘pressure’, which could be understood as all activities that are intended to make others change their behaviour against an original intention or original speed. Many activities and decisions in cooperative product development cannot be fully understood if pressure is not taken into consideration. The research described in this paper aims to explore some functions and consequences of pressure, since pressure is an eminent aspect of product development in industry and everybody has to deal with it and many sense it in a negative way; it is not clear what the optimal amount of pressure is. The main contribution of this paper is an analysis of the causes and effects of pressure in cooperative product development. The analysis is based on the authors' own experience in different companies in the automotive and automotive supplier industry, a number of discussions with other design managers and designers, a listing and structuring of observed phenomena and logical deduction. The main conclusion is that pressure can be either an incitement or an abashment. Pressure should not solely be understood as an undirected static pressure on individuals, but also as an incitement of the process in analogy to a flow. The paper is intended to serve rather as a systematic structure of questions and hypotheses than as answers to these questions, which can only be provided by interdisciplinary research of psychologists, business researchers and design or product development researchers. This rather speculative paper is intended to incite such research. Consequently, this paper first provides a definition of the rather blurred notion ‘pressure’; then the objective, generation, and diffusion of pressure in product development are discussed. The second part of the paper discusses how pressure and its consequences can be perceived, measured and determined in product development processes. The assumption is that there is an optimal point of pressure in terms of optimal process efficiency.

Keywords:

• cooperative product development
• human factors
• management of product development processes