Abstract: Product design has been long neglected in product innovation in Chinese enterprises, but with more studies made on the business value of design, design, as a new element of innovation, has gradually been a research focus. Based on the previous research findings and the design activities in Chinese enterprises, the paper aims to build a general framework for knowledge exchange among design teams from the perspectives of target, policy, means and resource. And it then discusses the influences of lead-users, top management policy, information technology and resources redundancy on the knowledge exchange among design teams. Finally, it studies the effect of knowledge exchange on innovation performance. It is found that top management policy is the key to knowledge exchange, and information technology is the way to have knowledge exchange. Having been affected by the conventional model for product innovation, lead-users and resource redundancy are not found to have much effect on improving the efficiency of knowledge exchange. The research results also indicate that effective knowledge exchange among design teams would greatly improve the innovation performance.

Key words: design teams, lead-users, top management policy, information technology, knowledge exchange, innovation performance