Launching Under Pressure: How Resource Scarcity Affects Design Decisions and Resource Management

Abstract Understanding how designers make decisions in resource-constrained environments such as product development is critical for improving design success and innovation outcomes. While prior work has investigated the effects of resource scarcities on human behavior in general, limited work has specifically investigated the patterns of decisions that result. In this work, we investigate differences in these behaviors across professional designers in high- and low-performing groups. A total of 123 designers participated in this study and played a serious game, The Incubator, which mimics new product development in a controlled environment. In The Incubator, players make a series of decisions about networking, funding, hiring, customer discovery, and product design. The objective of this game is to maximize the success of a product, measured by market capture, and minimize the time and cost of design. Performance was evaluated using data envelopment analysis, with financial and temporal resources as inputs and market capture as the output. Differences were observed in the decision-making patterns and allocation of resources between the top and bottom 20% of performers. Findings from this study offer insights into how designers respond to resource scarcities in a simulated design environment.