Early Supplier Involvement in Product Development: How to Assess the Project Team’s Ability to Co-Design with Suppliers?

It is now acknowledged that Early Supplier Involvement (ESI) in product development confers a competitive advantage. However, the implementation of ESI has been further extended to consider the successful product development, particularly through the RAP model (Lamming et al., 1996), as an interaction process between a customer firm and a supplier. We adopt this point of view in our paper aiming to shape the outline of customer’s ability to co-design with suppliers in New Product Development. We introduce two dimensions to specify this ability: open-mindedness and capability. We propose a tool to assess through both these dimensions the ability of a project team to successfully manage the co-development process with the suppliers. Our proposition was built with the collaboration of six French industrial manufacturers, partners of the PRAXIS research project (Performance in Relationships Adapted to eXtended Innovation with Suppliers