Keywords

1 Introduction

Italy modern furniture is famous all over the world for its high quality and extraordinary design. The distinctive development pattern also becomes to be the template for small and medium-sized furniture enterprises [1]. Meanwhile the product capacity of Chinese furniture industry grows rapidly over the past forty years [2]. Especially, referring to World Furniture Outlook Seminar in 2015, in the last five years, the product capacity of Chinese furniture industry grows steadily and always occupies the first place in the whole world. After five stages development of fill the blank of the market, improve product quality, expanding product scale, packaging design and regional competition, design driven mode has been introduced in Chinese furniture industry in 2004. The furniture market and product have been further subdivided, which directly results in the emergence of large numbers of designer furniture brands. This phenomenon can also be confirmed in the three domestic furniture exhibitions in recent years. All these facts reveal that design driven mode has formed in Chinese furniture industry currently. However, the gap existed between China and Italy furniture industry has to be faced. In order to shrink this gap, comparative study on China-Italy design driven innovation strategy furniture firms have been carried out in this work. The purpose of this paper is to explore the development law of China and Italy furniture firms, respectively, and further to provide comprehension of the culture pattern for each firm to adapt.

2 Design Driven Innovation Strategy

The introduction of design driven innovation strategy into the traditional business industries is at an early stage. Most of the investigations and applications of business strategy have focused on technology push innovation strategy and market-pull innovation strategy. The two strategies are proposed by the Italian professor Giovanni Dosi in 1982 [3]. The principle of technology driven innovation strategy is to increase high technology continuously for the firm, therefore it can possess competitive advantages. The market-pull innovation strategy is a classical one which has bearing on product communication. In 2003, based on the study of Italian firms, professor R Verganti brought forward the third innovation approach: design driven innovation strategy, where the innovative driving source of this strategy is design [4]. It is profitable for traditional industries, but it also serves on a deeper purpose in enhancing the lives of individuals. As a scheme, it expands and elaborates on the concept of form, in order to better capture the communicative and semantic dimension of a product. At its best, the design movement seeks to bring radical innovations to product language that has to adapt to new circumstances of economic competition, patent user requirements, social expectation and deeper cultural understanding [5]. For this reason, this strategy can lead to competitive advantage for manufacturers and currently more and more traditional furniture firms in China as in any other country adopted this strategy to upgrading.

Design driven innovation strategy is based on the idea that each product has a particular language and meaning. As shown in Fig. 1, this strategy includes three types of knowledge of user’s needs, technological opportunities and product language. Among them, the objective of product language as developed in the 1980s at HfG Offenbach is to enable a special crossover of theory and practice in design [6]. Therefore, it plays a crucial role in the three types of knowledge [3]. Differ from the traditional methodologies in product development process, a reverse procedure was adopted in design driven innovation strategy. That is, customer’s needs are collected to extract the product language in the former approach. To the latter one, product language is obtained based on the research on socio-cultural context. Further, the chosen product language is used to create specific information and symbols to guide customer’s needs.

Fig. 1.
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Design driven innovation strategy

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As most designers know, proposing new product language (a set of signs, symbols, and icons) implies an understanding of the inner dynamics of socio-cultural context. It goes beyond what is currently visible and must be researched and developed through a continuous process. To support this perspective, let’s consider the example of the Italy lamps industry. In the 1950s, the concept of “light design” (buying light instead of lamps) was proposed. As an innovation of meaning, the designers underline this innovation through the choice of product language. However, this concept is too obscure to be found in books or in sociological scenarios of the future. Under this circumstance, the corresponding socio-cultural context related to this concept was investigated to form the specific product language, and the product with new characteristics was then designed. Many similar success cases can be found in present Italy furniture firms [6].

3 Research Procedure

Figure 2 shows the research flow of design driven innovation strategy. A firm wants to deploy an innovation strategy based on design driven innovation needs to access knowledge of socio-cultural context to extract product language (convergence process). It may have several channels within which it may access this tacit and distributed knowledge, developing interactions with users, suppliers, other firms, training institutes, and so on. Subsequently, following the extracted product language, product design can then be performed (divergence process).

Fig. 2.
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Design driven research flow

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Table 1 lists research procedure, content and method applied in this paper. Case study was firstly performed to analyze product language, product design and socio-cultural context. Subsequently, difference between Chinese and Italian design driven innovation strategy furniture firms was discussed.

Table 1. Research procedure, content and method
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4 Case Study

As the premise and foundation of comparative study, case study was performed in this paper. Representative design driven innovation furniture firms in both countries were selected as cases firstly. Workshop was then launched to draw the business model canvas for each case. Modules of value proposition and testing board in obtained business model canvas were used to analyze product language, product design. Socio-cultural context was deduced based on the results obtained above.

4.1 Case Selection

A total of 30 representative Italy-China design driven innovation furniture firms were selected as case in this paper. Among them, eighteen Italian furniture firms were selected based on Milan design week field study. Twelve Chinese firms were chosen according to field study on Shanghai international furniture exhibition in recent two years. All cases are listed in Table 2.

Table 2. Research cases
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4.2 Product Language and Product Design

4.2.1 Business Model Canvas

The business model canvas [7], which was proposed by Alexander Osterwalderis a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool, and composes of nine modules. It allows you to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model. In this paper, workshop has been launched to draw the business model canvases for each case. Fifty seven senior students from East China University of Science and Technology were participated in this workshop. Among them, 30 students are major in industrial design, and the others are major in product design. During this workshop, contents and function of the nine modules have been illustrated to all the participators, and then blank business model canvas downloaded and printed from the official website of strategyzer. All the participators are required to finish the allocated work including information collection, canvas posting and keywords extraction in time.

4.2.2 Product Language Analysis

Within the nine modules in business model canvas, value proposition module is closely linked with product language. Then, production language analysis for each case can be realized by acquirement of value proposition module [8]. In this paper, value proposition questionnaire was used to extract value keywords and portray testing board based on business model canvas obtained above. Figures 3 and 4 show the value proposition questionnaire sample and value proposition questionnaire example, respectively.

Fig. 3.
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Sample questionnaire of value proposition

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Fig. 4.
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Example of value proposition questionnaire

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4.3 Socio-cultural Context Research

Italian furniture firms construct their socio-cultural context in a wide range. However, most Chinese firms are mainly focus on classical furniture, architecture and nature domain [9, 10].

5 Comparative Discussion

All the firms selected in this paper can be divided into five categories according to market hierarchies: art, luxury, high-end, middle-end and low-end market. On this basis, comparative discussion on China-Italy furniture firms was performed. The results are listed in Table 3.

Table 3. Comparative discussion on China-Italy furniture firms
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6 Conclusion and Prospects

Comparing to the Italy furniture industry, the introduction of design driven innovation strategy into China is at an early stage. Under the background of coexistence of opportunities and challenges, comparative investigation on China-Italy design driven innovation strategy furniture firms is necessary. In this paper, case study was used to analyze the three types of knowledge of design driven innovation strategy. Inductive discussion was subsequently performed. The results show that, differing from Italy furniture firms, the local firms made great efforts to extract design elements from traditional culture, which were then applied to modernized design. The differences between China-Italy design-driven innovation furniture firms can be summed up into the following 4 aspects:

  • Italian furniture firms are more concerned about systematic design. Once the product language was determined, the whole product-service-system was then built to follow this product language;

  • Italian manufacturer has an obvious advantage in technology and equipment;

  • Design driven innovation strategy is not suitable for low-end market firms;

  • Serious homogenization phenomenon for selection of production language in high-end market Chinese furniture firms need to be noticed.