The effects of design on firm performance and Turkey analysis

Increasing number of scientific studies that examine the relationship between the market shares of the products and design shows that the design increases its importance as a commercial activity. Nowadays, to keep up with this situation, companies are updating their design strategies and investments. A missing part of these studies introducing the value of the design and its effects in competition is that financial performance-based measurements cannot be measured or even if it can, its scope is limited and has subjective perspective. Some cases such as the definition of design differs for many disciplines, non-existing of the measurement criteria as in R& D and the common interactive processes of firms with other business areas such as marketing and product development obstruct the evaluation of design oneself. Given these barriers, the purpose of this study is drawing a framework that shows the effects of firms on their fields of activity and financial performance of industrial design registration as a quantifiable criterion and as an indicator for investment of firms to design. In the first part of the study, these issues were researched in the literature review, while in the second part, the role of design on the performance of firms in Turkey was analyzed. The data sets used in the analysis were taken from the Entrepreneur Information System (known as GBS) by introducing Republic of Turkey Ministery of Industry and Technology in 2014 which included information from 8 different public institutions and was also significant place in public policies. From the companies that make 1 design per week to 1 design in 16 months, 6413 firm data has been reached on a large scale and their profitability, stocks, sales, export values, the number of employee and wages of these firms have been evaluated by considering different factors. As a result of the study, these economic indicators were found to be high in firms with high design registration; however, it was seen that the employee wages were not in proportion with the number of design registrations. In addition to the measurement of design as "quantitative", to measure the effects of good design, the performance indicators of firms that had success in reputable competitions were measured. In this measurement, it was concluded that all of the indicators were higher than the average performance of 6413 firms in the sample.