Build design thinking into organizational DNA to infuse delight into customer’s lives
In Designing in hostile territory I talked about injecting design thinking into your organization using a subversive, bottom-up approach.
But to really benefit from design thinking, to create products and services that delight customers, an organization has to build design into their DNA, like many of the world’s most innovative companies have done.
Some of these companies have a long history of design. Others have embraced it more recently as an underpinning for organizational transformation.
For each, design has become a strategic approach to developing new products, services, or meanings, creating value for customers, and boosting the bottom line.
Companies that innovate through design
- Samsung 1993 deliberately chose design as a strategy to become one of the world’s leading brands
- P&G’s A.G. Lafley, in a game changing move, sought to weave design into every strand of P&G’s DNA to transform P&G from a place that’s good at selling “more goop, better” into one which uses design thinking to create products that infuse delight into customers’ lives
- Philips is emphasizing smart design to drive innovation, make happy customers, and boost the bottom line (for more on how, check out behind Philips’ “High Design” and driving innovation in corporate culture)
- Kaiser is looking to revolutionize health care using human-centered design and has built an infrastructure for innovation to use design thinking as a tool for finding solutions
- David Swift President of Whirlpool North America credits design as Whirlpool’s differentiator and a strong strong contributor to revenues which doubled over six years
- Apple is already well known for using design to innovate
- Herman Miller, strong proponents of a design approach for many years, are now applying design thinking to areas such as sustainability
- Even GE, a company known for its performance driven Six Sigma approach, is getting into the act after stumbling in the downturn to help the company shift from a focus on operational effeciency to imagination at work
- And in the UK, as part of a public service transformation effort to drive customer-focused change, they’re innovating by design in public services
Bucking the trend of the short corporate lifespan
3M is one of the oldest companies that has bucked the trend of the short corporation lifespan through design thinking. Mauro Porcini, Head of Design for the Consumer & Office Business at 3M, describes how design thinking is embedded into 3M’s DNA. “Infusing design successfully in a corporation is not about an isolated team of super-designers. Designing successfully in a corporation is about the way the entire company thinks.”
3M’s approach to embedding design into their corporate DNA reflects the recommendations made by Roberto Verganti in Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean. To achieve design-driven innovation he argues we need to “investigate the evolution of society, economy, culture, art, science, and technology” using interpreters to research how people give meaning to things. Thus, relational assets with key interpreters (social capital slowly built over time, tacitly preserved, and carefully nurtured), combined with internal assets (corporate memory), and the interpretation (design) process become core assets that are difficult for competitors to copy.
Need help selling the value of design?
Try the Value of Design Factfinder put together the UK Design Council based on extensive research which concluded that businesses using design perform better than their rivals.
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