TITLE:
Analyzing Internal Stakeholders’ Salience in Product Development
AUTHORS:
Tuomo Kinnunen, Aki Aapaoja, Harri Haapasalo
KEYWORDS:
Design for X, DFX, Stakeholder, Salience, Product Development, Product Management, Assessment, Analytic Hierarchy Process, AHP
JOURNAL NAME:
Technology and Investment,
Vol.5 No.2,
May
13,
2014
ABSTRACT: Many companies
apply Design for X principles to consider production and product lifecycle cost
implications in the early phase of product development. In these companies,
representatives of different Design for X disciplines form a specific group of
internal stakeholders. This single case study constructs a stakeholder salience
assessment framework and uses the framework to analyze internal stakeholders’
salience in product development in the case company. As the main result, the
compared stakeholders are sequenced and their relative saliences are valued and
visualized. In that single case, product management representatives perceived
Design for Testing as clearly the most salient stakeholder being four times
more salient than Design for Packaging. The framework and assessment procedure
are applicable to use in other contexts and companies. This study exemplifies
usage of the framework but the results are not generalizable. After salience
assessment a company may take corrective actions to increase or decrease the
salience of specific stakeholder group, to disband an internal stakeholder group,
to consolidate some stakeholder groups together, or to segregate a Design for X
group into several groups. The novel approach of this study is to apply the
stakeholder salience assessment framework in product development context.