The Design Management Institute offers an interesting article titled "Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go" written by Ryan Jacoby and Diego Rodriguez, two Business Factor Consultants from IDEO.

Design thinking is a crucial business asset—one that can, indeed, move a company forward and improve the bottom line. To optimize this impact, Ryan Jacoby and Diego Rodriguez advise thoughtfully structuring the innovation process. They stress working on projects that improve people’s lives, and they present a “ways to grow”model that helps managers direct and assess innovation efforts.

 

The have also included a nice chart detailing their understanding of potential innovation outcomes and the impact on organic growth.

Organic growth can emerge from every quadrant of Ways to Grow. Use this tool to a) identify the type of growth you intend to create, b) to recognize the scope of that challenge and deploy an appropriate innovation process, and c) to assess your portfolio of innovation efforts.

A few more key messages of the article:

You must uncover human needs to design compelling user value propositions.

In order to deliver on the value proposition, will we—or could we—use technologies that are new to our organization or to the people who will use them?

Download the full article.

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Nick Leon doesn’t like the term “design thinking”. The former business development director for IBM’s Global Services Division in Europe who is the new director of Design London, a multidisciplinary educational initiative launched recently by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London, prefers a term that is more serious and in his opinion better suited for boardrooms. He suggest the use of the phrase “design method”.

You have to talk about something with more rigor. ‘Design method’ is how you organize multidisciplinary teams, how you exploit technology or what processes and practices you might apply. These are all things that are as natural as breathing to a designer—but which aren’t regularly used in a business sense. To start talking about ‘design thinking’ in the boardroom or in the business school doesn’t seem strong enough. It seems a little conceptual—I want to get deeper than that.

I am able to relate that it might be difficult to convice executives to “think about design” when they would rather prefer to apply some “design method” to solve their problems. A “design method” also has the benefit that you can suddenly become really busy with planning projects, calculating business cases and setting milestones which is all very complicated when you are talking about something conceptual as “design thinking”.

Nevertheless it is essential to differentiate between actual design methods and the philosophy behind these methods: the way of identifying problems, seeing potential solutions and the focus on fulfilling customer needs. These are just some areas within design thinking and they can’t be substituted with design methods.

If the use of “design method” instead of “design thinking” is what it takes to spread the word, then this is what we should use. Yet we should not forget, that we have to “design think” as well and not just apply “design methods”.

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FORA, the Danish Authority for Enterprise and Construction’s Division for Research and Analysis, has published the study “Concept Design – How to solve complex challenges of our time” which focuses on how design can be utilised together with other disciplines to create new solutions to the global challenges faced by public and private sectors.

Companies are shifting from asking themselves how products should be designed, how they should be produced and how they should be marketed to asking more fundamental questions such as what should the company focus on or what problems should the company’s innovations solve. Concept design is the discipline of creating concepts that provide answers to these questions and solutions for the identified problems.

The study provides an analysis of Danish companies offering concept design services as well as an overview of other international concept design firms. Dinesh Godburdhun, Senior Team Lead at Gravity Tank shares his view about this new industry:

“I think that what this new industry has in common is that there are complex problems out there. And clients don’t know who they should call to get them solved. Normally they would call their advertising agency, market researcher, design house or what have you, and today a lot of these people are handed complex problems by clients because it’s not quite clear who should be doing them.”

All in all an interesting study, and if you ever wanted to catch a glimpse into the offices of concept designers, check out the pictures included in the study.

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Ben Terret at NoisyDecentGraphics has an interesting article about his observations that design is becoming the new management consultancy. Yes, I agree and from a strategic point of view it makes totally sense as well.

One of the main tasks of management consultancies is helping companies finding and strengthening their competitive advantage - a finding a space for differentiation from its competitors that leads to higher profits. Higher profits can be achieved by reducing costs or charging higher prices. But here is the problem: You will reach a point where you are simply not able to significantly reduce costs without increasing the effort to do so.

The only way to increase your profits then is to be charging higher prices - something that can only be achieved with improved products and services. And this is exactly the stage where designers come in. Just to make things clear: the designer is not the guy doing the layout for your marketing folder. Designers are the individuals that create and re-define your products and services to deliver a unique and improved experience for your customers. And they are the ones that can help define something fresh and innovative which can be used to improve your products and services.

Is this a management task? I would say so because it is about the organizations positioning and competitive advantage which should definitely be on top managements agenda.

Nevertheless the question remains: does this really lead to higher profits? This certainly depends on your cost-control measures but if you are able to deliver improved customer experiences, you can certainly be sure that your customers are willing to pay a price premium for that.

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