Designing with Edge Consumers: How Inclusive Design Orientation Transforms New Product Development

Industry leaders and academics recognize the importance of addressing the needs of edge consumers—those who are underserved or unserved in a marketplace. Yet little is known about how organizations transform their new product development (NPD) processes to create inclusive products. Adopting a theories-in-use approach, the authors draw on interviews with industry experts, combined with secondary data, to develop grounded insights on how inclusion can be embedded in NPD. The authors introduce inclusive design orientation (IDO), defined as the extent to which members of an organization share the belief that designing with a diverse set of consumers’ needs in mind is an organizational imperative and engage in product design and development practices consistent with that belief. IDO represents a novel organizational orientation that shifts firms from designing for the “average user” toward intentionally engaging edge users in the innovation process. The framework presented in this article identifies antecedent conditions that foster IDO, external and internal factors that enable or constrain IDO, and short- and long-term business outcomes. This research develops organic theory by introducing IDO and offers a blueprint for NPD transformation by providing actionable insights to advance inclusive design and demonstrating how engaging edge consumers can fuel inclusive product innovation.