How is a product manager-designer relationship in a professional setting stimulated to generate a creative outcome?

Pioneer companies capture the market through product and/or service innovation. However, the innovation success rate is very low, and innovators need to learn the successful process from market leaders. Creativity as an idea for innovation is the key to competing with leading manufacturers. This research investigates the mechanisms through which the key influential factors in product development process (i.e., co-design, design brief, intrinsic motivation, and managerial risk-taking and trust), lead to creativity in product development outcomes. As pioneer producers often work with professionals to ensure success, we asked professional product managers and designers worldwide about a product development process with a creative outcome that they had undertaken. It has found managerial “risk-taking” and “trust,” as well as “co-design” and the design “brief,” which are congruent with the key factors in the agency theory, to be influential factors on outcome “creativity.” Furthermore, the results show the prominent role of the intrinsic motivation of professionals in a product manager-designer relationship. The current research is the first study that simultaneously investigates both professional product designers and managers worldwide to reveal how their creativity is stimulated in a new product development process. The research expands our knowledge about manager–agent; and manager–professional agent theories, and develops those by proposing the “professional manager-professional designer relationship”.