‘Good Enough’: The Use of Satisficing in the Design of Disruptive Innovation in Emerging Economies

ABSTRACT While design has been acknowledged as a fundamental driver of innovation, questions remain about how design affects disruptive innovation from the perspective of consumer perceptions. Drawing from Simon's insights of bounded rationality and satisficing applied within the technology acceptance model (TAM), we propose an integrated, customer‐based framework to examine the role and impact of ‘good enough’ product design on customer perceptions and behavioural intentions in the context of disruptive innovation. We use the term, ‘good enough’ as a short‐hand description of the process of satisficing in the design of disruptive innovation. We simplify a disruptive innovation as consisting of three dimensions, namely, aesthetics, primary functionality and secondary functionality. We identify affordability, along with usefulness and ease‐of‐use, as three major types of consumer perceptions towards disruptive innovations. Validation of the framework is through 307 potential Chinese buyers of passenger and cargo dual‐purpose vehicles, which are disruptive innovations in the mainstream multi‐purpose vehicle market in China. The empirical results show that these design dimensions of disruptive innovations have significant effects on consumers' perceptions, which fully mediate the influence of the primary functionality dimension on purchase intention and partially mediate the influences of the aesthetic and secondary functionality dimensions. The results support that the ‘good enough’ design principle is appropriate for design dimensions of disruptive innovations, along with clarifying the effects of primary and secondary functionality design on consumers' purchase intention, thus contributing to our understanding of disruptive innovations. Meanwhile, the relevance of perceived affordability to consumers' perceptions of disruptive innovation, new insights emerge into product adoption and customer preferences for disruptive innovations.