Currently, there is growing interest in shaping a digital ecosystem that embraces holistic design approaches. In the digital realm, organizational approaches to managing design are required to shift to ‘designing’ towards holistic digital design, rather than ‘design’ for a completed output.
Within this context, this paper reviews how organizational cultures can impact the development of holistic product design in competitive digital landscapes. This is done by investigating different organizational cultures as reflected in large Eastern and Western organizations’ approaches to managing design in the new product development (NPD) process. Despite significances of ‘designing’ this study discovered ambidexterity aspects of digital design in NPD projects, from international organizational perspectives. The findings offer key understandings that can explain the dilemmatic relations by examining key differences of design priorities in new digital product development in the East and the West: namely the East focusing on ‘design output’; whereas the West expecting ‘design outcomes’. Based on this we propose two major scenarios that represent the different approaches to managing design by organizational cultures.