Establishing a dynamic model for factors favouring multiple designs

The dominant design literature has identified several factors and forces that favour the emergence of a dominant design. In other occasions, however, multiple designs continue to compete with each other without having a single product design that reaches market dominance. Various scholars used these occasions to explore which circumstances and factors facilitate multiple designs to co-exist. However, the factors and circumstances that were identified lacked the dimension of time, making them static and difficult to apply in on-going battles. In this study, a dynamic model is built using the literature to identify factors that favour multiple designs taking into account the different phases of the dominant design emergence process. It appears that these factors differ profoundly in relevance as well as strength throughout the emergence process. The model that has been developed is particularly useful for understanding dominant design battles that are on-going or subject to rapid change.