Industrial Design, Competitiveness, Globalization and Organizational Strategy

The ongoing deepening of globalization is associated with enhanced competition and especially price-based and design-based competitiveness. High value-added goods are developed, designed and still manufactured in developed market economies whilst low value-added goods may be designed in developed market economies, but manufactured in low-cost economies like China, India or Turkey (Deitz and Orr 2006). The concentration of the production of low value-added manufactured products in countries like China represents a stage in the evolution of the economic geographies of production. Nevertheless, Chinese firms are trying to move up the value chain to produce design-intensive and branded high value-added goods. The relationship between high value-added goods and developed market economies is partly explained by a shift that has occurred in these locations, away from competition based on price, to competition based on intangibles such as design, branding, research and development (R&D) and embedded or attached services (Bryson et al. 2004; Bryson 2008, 2009a & b). It is important not to be too fixated on consumer products. The majority of products are designed; this includes machine tools, ships, medical scanners and safety clothing intended for extreme environments and used, for instance in marine fishfarming or the oil and gas industry (Rusten and Bryson 2007, Rusten and Stensheim 2007, Rusten 2008).