In their article “The Open Design Effect,” Schöller Fellow Dr. Lukas Maier and Schöller Senior Fellow Prof. Dr. Martin Schreier (with D. W. Wahl) investigate how open design activities influence consumers’ perceptions of companies and their products.
Drawing on a series of laboratory and field studies, they show that products presented as being developed through open design are perceived as more attractive than comparable products without such a description. The authors attribute this “Open Design Effect” to consumers’ tendency to perceive companies that voluntarily share innovation-related knowledge as providing greater benefits to society. The effect becomes stronger when a company’s actions are perceived as being motivated by moral rather than self-interested intentions and when the shared knowledge has already been adopted by many other firms. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the effect is anchored in the notion that open design activities involve outflows of firm-internal (vs. inflows of firm-external) knowledge. Overall, the study highlights that the way companies develop innovations and manage their knowledge can positively influence perceptions of their social responsibility and, ultimately, the attractiveness of their products.
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