**1. Introduction**

Corporate innovation strategies function within increasingly complex environments marked by rapid product launches and challenges for defining and anticipating consumers' changing expectations. Even with extensive research into the adoption of innovations, both incremental and radical hybrid products call into question the findings' applicability of even relatively recent studies. The launch rate of new hybrid products has accelerated in the past decade such that designers need to be constantly challenging trade-offs and compromises in order to go beyond the optimization strategies. Innovation designers are continuously breaking categories, combining

them, and creating new ones, going from innovation as invention [1] to innovation as recombination [2]. These new hybrid products (NHPs) often incorporate the functionalities and usages of two (or more) original concepts or suggest new ways to use an existing product. These newly created objects appear mainly in the field of nomadic technology devices (e.g., smartphones, digital camera scanners), and their launches have been aided by technology convergence [3, 4].

These hybrids [5], combined [6] or ambiguous [7] products in turn widen the choice and use options available to consumers and grant more flexibility and latitude to producers and retailers in terms of positioning, such that they can redefine the contours of their markets. However, they also generate uncertainty and perceived risky arbitrations for consumers, which may lead to antagonistic consumer attitudes toward them, unexpected forms of appropriation, unanticipated or approximate estimates of performance, and unintended uses. Although we do not mean to discount the issues raised by NHPs for supply actors (producers and retailers), this study focuses on the issue of evaluation and categorization of new hybrid products from a consumer standpoint. Several recent studies in the marketing field have examined the effect of product knowledge, familiarity, and typicality on categorization of hybrid products [5, 6, 8, 9]. However, these studies have overlooked the role of design in the development and adoption of new hybrid products through their ability of differentiation and attractiveness [10] and suggested uses. Moreover, because of their multifunctional and complex nature, these hybrid products question the direct classification based on the concepts of existing products [5], and the design may be an important means for consumers to infer the product's uses and to predict their performance. Thus, according to reference [11], the authors call for further work to understand how design components might most effectively induce perceived similarity between the object and the target product category, an objective which is particularly relevant to multifaceted new hybrid products; we intend to bridge the gap between the design components and categorization of new hybrid products while highlighting the risky dimension in this process. Indeed, only few recent studies explore the categorization process of NHPs using the affordance concept [12, 13], we still do not know how consumers use knowledge derived from existing categories or generate new knowledge, to assign new hybrid products to a host category (existing one or one to be created). This research aims in particular to understand how consumers mobilize the design to make sense and categorize ambiguous NHPs, and how this process lowers or increases the risky dimension of choice.

To meet this goal, this chapter is structured around three points: the first section tends to show/question the relevance of theories of categorization and affordance as chunks of assessment and attribution of NHPs to host categories. The second section describes the methodological choices made to empirically investigate the categorization of a new hybrid electronic device (the Flip Phone). Finally, the third section discusses the main results and highlights the implications of this research both on theoretical and managerial levels.
