Building a Support Model for Design Management for SMEs (Japanese)

From the perspective of utilizing design in business management, METI and JPO announced some characteristics of design management organization in the Declaration for Design Management. In this paper, we hypothesized that SMEs and large enterprises would benefit from having different design organizations and conducted a survey on how different organizations view design management. From this survey, we found that design management in SMEs is different from that of large enterprises, and that it is close to the elements in “The Nine Entrances†proposed by the Japan Patent Office. Seven similar factors were derived for large companies and SMEs, but for SMEs, many additional factors related to improving internal understanding were found. In particular, it is important to directly connect design management to business profits in the case of SMEs. Thus, when supporting the introduction of design management in SMEs, this paper concluded that for business construction (or reconstruction), it is desirable to provide support that is specific and appropriate to the situation of each company. This support should be provided by designers with specifically relevant design expertise. One policy implication from this paper is that building a support model for design management for SMEs is an important consideration for the direction of policy.