A model of product design management in the Spanish ceramic sector

Product design is an essential aspect of the process of new product development and innovation, the efficiency of which depends on the existence of some kind of management. However, there is no generally accepted agreement as to exactly what activities this management involves, nor any analyses of the most suitable context for it to develop in or of the relationships that link these activities with performance. In this paper, we study product design management in depth and examine in what way and in which contexts it contributes to an improvement in performance. In order to do so, we carried out a case study of four companies from the Spanish ceramic tile sector that also revealed the activities of an efficient product design management. These were divided into two phases of the product design process: the analytical‐conceptual and the technical‐creative phases.