Design and Business

We used to think of design as something consumer product companies leverage to differentiate their offerings, and rarely used outside of that realm. But a revolution in the use of design approaches and techniques to create customer-centric experiences for customers everywhere has already begun. Design, or business design, “applies design and design thinking to business problems with the objective of bringing innovation to life” (Tanimoto, 2018). 

Tanimoto explains that business designers have to frame the design process through the lens of the business, so as to solve business problems in a human-centric way that meets both desirability and viability considerations. The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto illustrates business design through 3 “gears”: empathy and need-finding; prototyping and experimentation; and business strategy.

The confluence of design and business will accelerate. This change is driven by hyper-competition, which is making it harder and harder to differentiate your products from your competition. The traditional sources of differentiation – unique products, unique manufacturing capabilities, distinct and difficult-to-obtain knowledge and information, etc. – are no longer sustained sources of competitive advantage.

This is driving a change from product competition to competing on total customer experience. In turn, this is requiring a shift towards a deep understanding of how customers experience the product, how to collect and utilise data to continuously improve that experience, a renewed emphasis on the customer journey and process mapping and refinement, and collaboration across departmental units to orchestrate and deliver that total experience.

And this data-driven, continuous improvement, deep understanding of how customers experience your product and service end-to-end, both physical and digital, which requires cross-functional teams to work together in more agile structures than ever before is embodied in one word: Design.

What is Design

The new definition of design in the context of business is an evolving one. One of the best definitions I have come across is from McKinsey:

"Design is not just about making objects pretty. Design is the process of deeply understanding customer/user needs and then creating a product or service – physical, digital, or both – that addresses their unmet needs."
- Sheppard et al., 2018

Sheppard homes in on four capabilities in design; analytical leadership (“measure and drive design performance with the same rigour as revenues and costs”), cross-functional talent (“make user-centric design everyone’s responsibility and not a siloed function”), user experience (“break down internal walls between physical, digital and service design”), and finally continuous iteration (“de-risk development by continually listening, testing and iterating with end-users”).

I foresee a future where business innovation designers will be in extremely high demand, to lead digital transformation initiatives in companies of all sizes.

The business innovation designer: will be both human-centred and profit-centred, with a bias towards executability and action embraces ambiguity, and practises continuous refinement to achieve excellence.

There is a natural evolution from the design thinking path or a design background – whether industrial or visual or user experience-oriented in origin – to use design principles in business, as they would be more in touch with the human-centred origins of business design.