bplusd

There’s an interesting challenge in the business and design conversation - business and design means different things to different people.

There are a few themes that arise in b+d conversations:

• Design management - how can we manage a design department and integrate designers with the rest of the organization?
• Design as a business function - applying the above design group to improve style, form, and function of the company’s products or services.
• Design as an avenue to innovation - using design methods to explore opportunities for innovation (though design is not innovation, innovation can emerge from design activities). Typically, innovation and design revolves around the above design group comes up with cool new things. This is where the mainstream press coverage in the last couple years has focused, sometimes conflating design and innovation.
• Strategy as Design - Applying design mindset, methods, and tools to frame and solve problems outside tangible products and services, corporate strategy being a core example, and typified by leaders like
  • Roger Martin (Business of Design)
  • Jeanne Lidtka (Strategy as Design)
  • Richard Farson (Management by Design)
  • Richard Boland and Fred Collopy (Managing as Designing).

While there is some coverage of the strategic perspective, it is dwarfed by the focus on novelty that so often stands in for innovation.

Personally, I’m most interested in the strategic conversation, and substantive thinking about innovation that goes beyond novelty. Ideally, the two are paired - using design thinking to inform strategic direction, and executing strategy using design methods to drive true innovation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 24th, 2005 at 11:45 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.