Abstract
Though a body of research has revealed that the early definition of a product concept is beneficial for new product development, some authors have suggested that concept shifting during is necessary in a particular situation. Concept shifting is crucial in some case, but its process is not well understood. In this study, in order to understand concept shifting in more detail, I try to develop a framework based on Daft and Weick’s (1984) organization as interpretation system perspective. Four product development cases, where concept shifting occurred in three cases and does not occurred in one case, are studied and two major findings are obtained. First, project team’s assumptions about the environment is changed from analyzable to unanalyzable with a concept shifting. When a project team faces to information inducing concept shifting, the product concept becomes unstable and thus the project team changes their information scanning mode. Second, based on first finding, a process of concept shifting can be broken down into three patterns, which is “unstable concept shifting”, “active concept shifting” and “passive concept shifting”. My conclusion is that these patterns help us to understand an organizational process of concept shifting as an information interpretation system.
