Cognitive Biases And Heuristics In The New Product Development Process

The unpredictable swings shaking current economy bring executives to obstinately fathom which the main sources of troubles are, with the scope of gaining back competitiveness on the market scene. Overdesign is one of the recently examined sources of corporate issues and refers to the inclination of designers to outline products with features that go far beyond customers’requests and expectations, giving rise to longer time to market, higher production costs and customer dissatisfaction. This empirical research has the innovative purpose of exploring overdesign with a behavioural perspective, on the wave of the latest schools of thought which promote the introduction of human variables in economic models. The outcome defines whether and to what extent overdesign is determined by cognitive biases. Building thus on previous literature, a survey among R&D managers of Italian household and furniture companies has been conducted, followed by a two-step statistical analysis and by a round of interviews that further deepened the study. Evidence from more than100questionnaires shows that cognitive biases positively influence overdesign, meaning that the higher the magnitude of the biases, the higher the level of overdesign. The most significant ones refer to the optimism and enthusiasm that characterize developers’ personalities, the" conflicts of interests that could arise among organizational departments and the charisma of team leaders. The study validates scholars’ thesis stating that intuition should be avoided in unpredictable environments and concludes that executives should commit themselves to promote more structured approaches in decision-making situations.