Design for Business / Business Design- Design leaders within organizations now have much more clout, and in-turn accountability, to drive new business growth. We are continuing to see numerous examples in how design can play a myriad of  roles to maximize a companies triple bottom line. From creating new marketing and product offers through the use of “traditional” design tools and methodologies across the value chain, to business model innovation, design continues to help lead the way from incremental to transformative new business. Chuck Jones, former VP of global consumer design and user experience  at Whirlpool, pointed out that design is an ecosystem within a company, able to be a key growth driver for business. Given the success Chuck brought to Whirlpool, (http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/Case-studies/Whirlpool/) design and innovation have undeniably played a pivotal role in its growth strategy.

Design Thinking- For me, this is a fascinating topic. Mostly, because as an American working abroad, I see the difference of acceptance or “buy in”  between the two cultures. Americans are quick to embrace the “next big thing”, and thanks to the popularity of the term with it’s buzz-worthy media coverage, this concept has quickly made it’s way onto the agenda of many board rooms in America. However, there is still some scepticism of the term in Europe, and many are taking a let’s wait and see approach to see if the term will indeed stick around. It is interesting to note that some front runners on the topic, such as Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management, have already moved beyond the term to encompass a larger community. Rotman has now trademarked the term Integrative Thinking™, thus implying that creative thinking, aka Design Thinking, belongs to more than designers. And it has been pointed out by many critics that the term Design Thinking implies that creative means only offers visionary outcomes, leaving the next step unclear of who should implement the action of Design Doing.

Design Culture – Thanks to the run away success of Apple, many companies are now seeking design as a main competitive advantage. However, if a company could actually create the next i(product), it would be hard pressed to say that it would indeed be a success. There is a joke in the design community that a business exec walks into their design department, and demands the “next ipod”. The Design Manager quickly rebuts back, “Give me the next Steve Jobs”! Doing good design is simply not enough. A design culture must be in place to ensure that design in sewn into the corporate fabric, enabling design to reach all touchpoints and add value. However, the true value of design and it’s role is often misknown or misunderstood by non designers, and anything attached with the term “design” if often seen as foreign territory to them.  David Butler made a great assessment of his appointed role of VP of Design for Coca Cola. When asked what his role was within the company, he simply replied “to sell more stuff”. David pointed out that design language often gets in they way when trying to position design within a corporate culture, and if you simply “design to win” then everyone is on the same team. And when design helps to win, no matter who is credited, the organization can slowly build up a design culture foundation.

As these topics become discussed more and more at forums such as DMI, where there has been an increasing amount of non designer attendes  (i.e. business people), linking business objectives to incorporate design more will continue to transform business at an remarkable rate. 

Given the recent attention to design as a growth and innovation enabler, as design managers we must re-think how we can better position design to continue to deliver value for the triple bottom line.

Over the past decade, the practice of design management has become more professionalised. Corporate boards take leaders of design functions seriously. Boards, however, affirm top design managers informally. In the recruitment of design managers, they don’t have a whole lot of evidence to go on, apart from candidate résumés and war stories. Introducing some sensible norms for design management practice would help designers continue the process of professionalisation into the next decade.

The way design managers do their work and succeed in it cannot be left at the level of oral anecdote or self-serving conference presentation. It’s time we grew up. Across country borders, we need succinct, fair and tough rules for how we do business. We also need agreed means for comparing performance between different entities in design management, so that we can all improve the value we add. How do we best try to measure the costs and the benefits of design management? Clearly, project briefing, process and evaluation need norms. So do supply chains, recruitment, education. Perhaps salary ranges, job titles and job descriptions could do with a bit of rationalisation, too. But at the moment we have nothing…

Nobody should try to imitate grey lawyers and still greyer accountants by inventing a national or international bureaucracy to enforce the new norms. And everybody should research what went wrong with the Total Quality movement, ISO 9000 and all that. But though standards can be a drag, in some instances they have brought real results. The different layers of the Internet, for example, only work well because the world’s leading computer engineers have established norms for how they should operate. The European Union is trying to normalise its multiple systems for trains and for air traffic control; eventually, it might even succeed.

In design management things need not be so complicated. But once refined in the field, some firm guidelines – a maximum of six! – might prove useful in removing some of the opacity that surrounds the practice of managing design.

We need to change our 1950’s mindset where people were totally enchanted about “better living through more consumption”. www.thestoryofstuff.com

Design has become the flagship of many companies and it is being hyped to sell more products within the B2C market as well as in the B2B market. But in these days where sustainability is a major topic, we cannot justify design relevance with the fact that we thereby sell more products. There is definitely a challenge for the design community to ensure creation of sustainable design. To address the topic more holistically I’d rather talk about responsible design: design that brings true value to society on all levels. So how to do it?

First step: implement responsible design management!

The article “The big idea – The Sustainability Imperative” in Harvard Business Review (May 2010), illustrates that many companies are still wandering in the dark, when they actually should not. Like with all other business strategies, there is a roadmap to create a successful vision for sustainable design management and it moves systematically through the same four stages of value creation:

1. Deliver proof of value by focusing on proactively reducing costs, risks and waste.
2. Redesign selected new products, processes or business functions to optimise their performance.
3. Drive revenue growth by integrating innovative approaches into the core strategy
4. Differentiate the value proposition through new business models that enhance corporate culture, brand leadership and other intangibles.

On top of that, the same basic rules as for design management apply for implementing responsible design management:

1. It starts with the philosophy!
   It’s time to take leadership. We need to ensure a holistic sustainable approach, from production methodologies through to design processes and supplier partnerships. Shape the philosophy and ensure alignment with the business strategy! Take a look at the sustainability pioneer Patagonia (who have been highly successful within the crisis time) and learn from their philosophy^[1]
2. It requires commitment!
   We need to engage the whole design team. Team up with stakeholders and make commitments. Implementing the vision often means changing large, inert companies and thus requires a persistent and committed design team. Making commitments to specific goals helps to drive achievements.
3. It demands proof!
   Proving the value of responsible design does however the right assessment and we require new methods, as we cannot measure new thinking with old standards. We already mentioned the using brand value measurements like the Good Brands Report (measuring brands on imagination, innovation, environmental responsibility and social consciousness). But there are also other methods being developed to prove responsibility, both company internal (such as the Fujitsu Cost/Green Index) as external, such as the IDEA awards, now including evaluation on social, ecological, cultural, as well as economic responsibility. As the IDSA mentions: “The design profession can no longer claim excellence in design unless we have considered the concept of responsibility as a central part of the design problem”.^[2]
4. It demands responsible products & strategies!
   We need to walk the talk. We can start with offering recycling services^[3] and try to improve the CO2 & H2O-footprint of our products and production methodologies. On top of that are possible strategies aiming for different product usage whilst battling against continuous product replacement^[4] through:
   1. designing for variability (e.g. children’s furniture adaptable to the child’s age & size)
   2. designing for increased product attachment^[5]
   3. preparing the product for future repair or upgrading (through better design management of all customer touchpoints and services)
5. It needs to be transparent!
   We need to be authentic about it. We need to set goals & objectives on top management level, ensure transparent decision making and take accountability & responsibility for our actions.
6. It needs to be communicated!
   Internally, we need to build best practices. Externally, we need to educate the user. We need to better explain the benefits to the end-user by reducing complexity of our products to help the customer understand. An interesting article in the PAGE gives hands-on insights in how to best reflect a green brand in packaging^[6].

Without doubt, the list is not complete yet. And I’m sure there are enough barriers we will encounter, but there is certainly no reasonable argumentation to not try.

Sources:
^[1] Globetrotter 4-seasons Magazine 25/2010, http://www.4-seasons.de/magazin/archive.php
^[2] http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/147/build-a-better-mousetrap.html?page=0%2C1
^[3] http://www.samsungmobile.co.uk/greenmanagement/treatment.do
^[4] Nicole van Nes & Jacqueline Cramer (2005) “Influencing product lifetime through product design”, Business Strategy and Environment, Volume 14, Issue 5, pp. 286-299
^[5] Mugge, R., Schifferstein, H. N. J., & Schoormans, J. P. L. (2004). “Personalizing product appearance: The effect on product attachment”, Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Design and Emotion, Ankara, Turkey
^[6] Silke Bochat, “Greenwashing? Nein Danke!” PAGE, September 2010

Business Model Canvas: nine business model building blocks, Osterwalder, Pigneur & al. 2010

Recently my colleague and I delivered a great workshop on business model innovation for new services. We used the Business Model Canvas developed by Alexander Osterwalder published under the creative commons license, which does an excellent job at explaining the WHAT.

However, what is left a bit undefined is the WHY?

Granted, we all know that companies need innovate business models to stay fresh and competitive in today’s changing landscape, but generating ideas based on assumptions of what the consumers (don’t know they) need is a daunting task.

In the recent book Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, they do an excellent job at explaining the HOW. They also touch on some basic principals to building a business model based upon customer insights. We aimed to create a deeper understanding on WHY?

Identifying the WHY: We need to ensure a stronger link to the needs and desires of the target group.

Keeping in mind the golden rule of today’s (ideal) design methodology, putting the customer first, we believe understanding the customer is a most valuable approach in developing innovative business models.

We found that personas and customer touch points are valuable in exploring stakeholder experiences, frustrations and challenges and in deepening the WHY. By becoming more understanding and empathetic of those whom we aim to please (or identifying unserved markets) business model generation can truly provide innovative new frontiers.

It can be argued that a great deal of design activity goes on in organizations which is not called “design.” It is carried out by individuals who are not called “designers” and who would not consider themselves to be designers.

The idea of the silent designer can be attributed to Herbert Simon. He proposed in his book “The sciences of the artificial” (MIT Press, 1981) that design is a basic human activity and that, actually everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. This means for design managers (e.g. working in companies with over thousand engineers) that they need to educate in basic design activities and provide tools for designing, if they want to manage the final product, holistically. This can be done for instance via workshops, best practice examples and in-company trainings.

Recently I came across how Nokia is educating non-designers in the basic principles of design. The Nokia design guide helps phone application developers to plan, design, and develop offerings that deliver great user experiences (UX) for Nokia platforms and technologies.

Are silent designers well educated in your own company? If not, develop tools and trainings to engage them, it will make your life as design manager much easier.

Education programmes for design managers often focus strongly on business of managerial skills. They tend to forget further education on design, that goes beyond Master programmes at University.

Do not forget to educate your design managers about creation and creativity.
They will need updating about the latest developments in technology, professional practice, social forecasting and the arts.

And, not unimportant, they will love it!

Lead User 1 from Entrepreneurship & Innovation on Vimeo (6 videos in total).

Lead users are a great resource for driving innovation. Here is a great case study about how lead user research at 3M led to long term innovations and revolutionised the innovation process at 3M.
Ignore the fact that the actual case study is a bit older and ignore the “Amazing Discoveries”-style of the video; the content is highly relevant and can be very inspiring if you think about using lead users within your innovation process!

If you want to know more, you can find detailed information on Eric von Hippel’s website or www.leaduser.com. For the complete 3M case article, please visit 3M case study.

Our company is still in the middle of a crisis, and all budgets, especially for R&D, are going down… But simultaneously there is a strong demand by our leaders to deliver more and more products, and the pressure to deliver more innovation is only increasing. How are we, at the design department, going to deal with the fact that we need to do more with less available resources?

Being super-efficient helps to ‘do more with less’. But let’s assume that you already have maximised the efficiency of your department: they simply cannot do more within their working time.
How then still deliver more output with less money?

The notion of ‘open innovation’ has been around for quite a while, but amongst design departments it seems not widely spread.
Why not work together with the design departments of other relevant companies?
This is mostly effective when focusing on design research and opportunity finding and not on time- and experience-demanding design execution.

Certainly when you combine it with the time and budget allocation of the ‘yearly inspiration trip’, it can be an efficient and effective way to boost the output of your design team…

If you want to read more about this idea of design departments working together, please check out this article from Business Week…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

This video^[1] is a great example showing how combining various design techniques, like storytelling and visualisation skills, delivers a presentation that holds your attention and makes you wondering what comes next.

So, need to convince your management? Use the creative strength of your designers to charm your audience and get the outcome you need!

And for those who can’t get enough, here’s another example: a great visual summary of a book.

^[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/1646337/science-shows-that-bigger-bonuses-create-worse-performance

The design management context (click image to download pdf)

Design management reaches the age of 45 (counting from the first publication in 1965) and is now in the middle of its midlife crisis, if we look on the current debates in the design management community. Inspired by Elvis, I raise the questions: What now, what next, where to?

What now?
The fight is over! Looking back on the history of design, management and design management, we can recognize that design gained credence in the business world and is today recognized as a valid business tool. This are not the credits of the designers alone, but was supported through paradigm shifts in the management discipline as well as the design discipline. Today, we need no longer prove the value of design, instead, we need to get the most out of it, in every single business situation.

What next?
Design and design management have experienced different generations of theories. In its first generation design focused on the object, in the second on the process and in the third on the user.^[1] Similar shifts can be seen in management and design management in almost parallel steps. For design management this has been illustrated by Brigitte Borja de Mozota^[2], using Findeli’s Bremen Model as a framework. Looking at the current developments in design management, we will face changes in following areas:

Education

1. We will recognize more integrated education models, to educate T-shaped professionals that have general knowledge in a few disciplines (e.g. management and engineering) and specific knowledge in a single domain (e.g. design).
2. Companies will continue to educate design managers from within to better match the companies challenges, but creating a need for a cultural context, where design managers prefer to stay (carriere paths, innovative thinking etc.)
3. Design managers will need to have stronger knowledge exchanges across industries (like Raymond events or best practice exchange), leading to a more sophisticated and reflected position in the company.

Collaboration

1. Companies will shift their focus from small T innovations (innovations involving only one discipline, like chemists) to big T innovations (innovations involving several disciplines, like design, ethnography, lead user etc.), making it essential to break down silos of departments.
2. The increasing speed of the market makes it necessary to have more flexible processes and teams (e.g.task forces like concept labs) and Rapid Business Prototyping (business beta versions, like Daimler Car Sharing).

Communication

1. Hidden design costs have to be uncovered and projects have to be managed more efficient, making it necessary to make accurate calculation of design costs.
2. Design managers still need to continuously learn and use the language of the business, to make design to an essential asset of the company rather than a nice-to-have surface phenomenon.

Where to?
It is difficult to predict where design management is heading to; but there are still a few white gaps on the landscape of design management research.^[3] However, design management education and research often fail to keep up with business reality, while design management practices are busy with solving day-to-day challenges and do not engage in academic discussions. Looking at both, academic research and business pratice, what do you think is worth to look at and not just another ephemeral fashion?

^[1] Alain Findeli, 2005: “The eclipse of the product in design theory” keynote lecture, European Academy of Design conference EAD6, “Design system evolution”, Bremen, March 29-31
^[2] Brigitte Borja de Mozota, 2006: “A theoretical model for Design in Management science according to the paradigm shift of the Design profession: from management as a constraint to management science as an opportunity”, 1st International Design Management Symposium D2B, Shanghai Jiao Tong University March 16-19
^[3] Ulla Johansson and Jill Woodilla, 2008: Towards a better paradigmatic partnership between design and management

However, perhaps because these different carbon counters always give conflicting results, design people also tend to drop all quantitative considerations when turning out a new, oh-so-sustainable design. Instead, they become idealistic and emotional, and are emphatic that their mission is to save the planet through design. Numbers are nowhere to be seen.

Wouldn’t it be better to strike a midway position? Here design people would quantify the benefits of environmentally-conscious work when such benefits can really be measured. But when there isn’t very firm evidence for such benefits, they would refuse to collapse into well-meaning ethical fudge.

More and more design managers have turned to crunching numbers. Sometimes they do this to reassure themselves; sometimes they do it to look professional; more often, we hope, they do it for substantive reasons. Whatever the motive, though, the kingdom of Excel now embraces all kinds of subjects: project budgets, salary increases, new IT – you name it.

It’s only a pity that the new numeracy in design very rarely embraces environmental issues. Attempts to calculate carbon footprints are bound to be rather fruitless, for the concept is riddled with confusions: should one take into account the energy required by using CAD in the studio, for instance? Yet if we are talking real, measurable savings in raw material inputs, or water used in production processes, or in the expense of disposal, then let’s do the required accounting and, in these cost-obsessed times, display our prowess to the management board.

Within Design Management and the buzz around design thinking these days, it is becoming more accepted that an inquisitive / explorative mind set is creating new business frontiers. And this (hopefully) means that business executives are now willing to listen to those artsy folks who were making pretty things. Managing designers takes a special balance between giving them their space and allowing for freedom (creativity) while working within constraints (briefs and deliverables). Often these designers do not fully speak their mind, yet these designers can be your biggest asset to foster organizational innovation.

While no one likes a trouble maker, I believe that by identifying, encouraging, and providing a platform that allow your designers who question strategic directions to be (potentially) heard at an executive level can foster the change your organization may need to not only stay alive, but thrive by creating new markets. Should a designer really be designing a new water bottle, when what they believe is that there should be a new sustainable system behind that? Allow them to speak freely, and these trouble makers, heretics, people who ask too many questions just may raise the right questions and challenges to shift strategic direction from the bottom up.

Although identifying and encouraging change can be good, the task behind managing and implementing it is a challenge that often closes the door. According to Caluwe & Vermaak, in a study of Change Paradigms, they propose a system of colors to identify and manage agents of change. The color system comprises five types of change agents:

• Yellow – getting everyone to think the same wavelength,
• Blue – change according to set plans,
• Red – change based on behavior and emotion,
• Green – change based on collective learning and growth, and
• White – change through an evolutionary process.

As a Design Manager, identifying and managing change through Green thinkers (who are often designer mindsets who continually seek new learning) and White thinkers (who are holistic thinkers and try to understand where opportunities lie and search for seeds of renewal and creativity), just may be your future design leaders and agents of change your organization needs.

http://www.decaluwe.nl/articles/ChangeParadigms.pdf