THE FRAME NETWORK OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STAKEHOLDER COMPOSITIONS IN THE EARLY PHASES OF NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

New Product Development (NPD) projects have continually become more complex over the years and now involve a diverse range of stakeholders, who have different disciplinary backgrounds, values, objectives, and experience. This makes them create different ‘frames’, which may represent conflicting perspectives. This might create challenges or bring the process to a standstill ultimately wasting resources. By analysing case studies from three different Scandinavian product development companies: LEGO, LEO Pharma, and Zenit Design, this paper investigates the characteristics of the framing process in the early phases of NPD projects involving interdisciplinary stakeholders in organisational settings. The study indicates that stakeholders create isolated aspired values and working principles and from these form a ‘network’ of ‘partial frames’ before connecting them into ‘fully defined frames’. The study also identifies core activities and events of the framing process and propose a model describing an iterative cycle of six phases that stakeholders in New Product Development go through, which we in this article call ‘The Interdisciplinary Framing Loop’.