Multitasking in the product development process: How opposing cognitive requirements affect the designing process

Engineers in development projects have to deal with a variety of cognitive challenges, especially in the process of problem solving. These requirements are often opposing. For example, the resulting product should become more cost-efficient and at the same time more powerful. The process of coping with various and often opposing requirements in product development resembles cognitively the simultaneous processing of multiple subtasks. In the research of cognitive psychology, it was found that the simultaneous processing of different tasks causes performance impairment, because the competing task demands interfere with each other. The aim of our study was to transfer cognitive psychological results of multitasking to the management of product development. On this basis a study was designed to empirically explore cognitive processes and multitasking effects during the product development process. For this purpose, engineering students accomplished different construction tasks with two different goals (i.e., as economic as possible vs. as functional as possible). In one condition, they had to switch randomly between these two goals, in the other condition, they first processed the tasks according to the first goal and then according to the second goal. We discuss our results in terms of cognitive requirements and draw conclusions for an effective and efficient innovation management.