A test of a design process scale

Design is a type of innovation that focuses on creating new product and service meanings. Models of the design process are important because they can help firms manage their product and service design processes to obtain competitive advantage. Empirically-based models of the design process are particularly valuable because they help us avoid cognitive biases when constructing the models and because they can lead to new theory development. Yet such empirically-based models are relatively small in number and not utilized outside of their original studies. Using the first two stages of Ravasi and Stigliani´s model of the design process, which model was based on a review of 125 articles and 20 books published between 1989 and 2011, we constructed a scale comprising four sets of redundant reflective measures. We then surveyed 131 design firms internationally with those measures. We then fit the scale to the survey results by using Confirmatory Factory Analysis. Using a variety of goodness of fit statistics, we found that a large portion of the scale fit the data.