The authors repeatedly associate generative design (GD) capability with organizational agility and pivot success, but the figures (particularly Figure 3) imply correlation without establishing causal mechanisms.
Critically, the figures (and narrative) fail to disentangle whether GD use is a cause of agility, or merely a proxy for other latent organizational traits, such as design culture, technological sophistication, or management flexibility, which are the true enablers of pivoting behavior.
This is a major conceptual flaw because:
Figure 3 shows differences in GD use between pivoting and non-pivoting firms, but without controlling for confounding factors (e.g., firm size, R&D intensity, organizational structure).
The pivoting firms may have succeeded not because of GD tools per se, but because they already possessed flexible, innovation-oriented processes, and GD use simply co-evolved with those traits.
The figures misleadingly suggest a direct causal effect of GD on pivot success without offering a design or analysis that could isolate GD’s independent contribution.
Thus, unless the authors can demonstrate that GD experience uniquely contributes to pivoting beyond other organizational capabilities, the visual evidence in Figures 2 and 3 risks reinforcing a spurious relationship.
A clarification is necessary on:
Whether the authors attempted to control for or account for confounding organizational factors when interpreting the GD–pivot relationship.
How the figures can be defended against the critique of illustrating correlation, but not causality.
Without resolving this, the conclusions drawn from the figures remain scientifically fragile.
The research design treats “GD usage” as an independent variable when it is almost certainly a symptom (or output) of a much broader AM capability foundation. The observed “pivot ability” is likely caused by this underlying foundation, not solely by the GD tool itself. The authors provide no evidence to rule out this alternative explanation.
The study cannot validly claim that GD is the unique or primary catalyst for human-AI symbiosis and pivot agility. The findings may simply show that well-resourced, mature AM firms are better at pivoting than less mature ones, and that these advanced firms also happen to use GD. This omitted variable bias invalidates the causal chain the authors attempt to build.