Designer portfolio archetypes in design-intensive industries

The paper analyzes the designer portfolio configurations employed by firms, in design-intensive industries, to implement different product design strategies. Using the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis methodology, the paper explores how decorative lamps manufacturers, that first adopted the new LED technology, assembled their designer portfolios. The study shows that, in the early phases of LED lamps, four different designer portfolio archetypes were adopted by firms, two of them related to a product language divergence strategy and two to a product language convergence strategy: international design-star archetype, crowd design-innovator archetype, local ambassador archetype, international bridge archetype. These four archetypes are discussed, contributing to a better understanding of the relationship between product design strategies and designers’ management in design-intensive industries.