Different Kinds of Strategic Design

  • Business design

  • Brand design

  • Strategy innovation

  • Organizational design

  • Interior design

  • Industrial design

  • Product design

  • Customer Experience (CX) design

  • User experience (UX) design
     

How To Make Design Thrive in Your Enterprise

  1. Ensure the right sponsorship from the top. Any change, especially cultural change, creates diverse enemies who resist it. The new design function and the new innovation culture need to be advocated and protected by the CEO or by somebody influential enough at the executive level.

  2. Establish the design function embedded inside the business organization. It should be a peer of other key functions such as business development, finance and marketing to be able to drive strategic innovation 360 throughout the organization. The key pillars of a design functions are senior leaders who run key strategic areas such as business design, strategy innovation, organizational design, brand design, product design, and customer experience design.

  3. Bring in the right kind of design leaders: masters of Strategic Creativity who have a holistic vision, broadly skilled, cross-functionally excellent business architects, proactive innovators who can manage all the different phases of design in a smart entrepreneurial way. Let these leaders to build their design teams.

  4. Integrate several quick wins in the implementation strategy and celebrate small victories to keep the spirit of the stakeholders high and to show them that you are moving in the rights direction in the right way. Identify and implement mini-projects where you can show the value of design very quickly inside to the stakeholders.

  5. Learn from early successes and failures and adapt your strategy of building processes that can enable the new approach to be adopted by all the stakeholders willingly.  Involve them in building a new design-friendly culture and integrating it inside the organization.

Then you need to identify quick wins: those projects where you can show the value of design very quickly inside the organization. On the basis of this early success, you start to build processes that can enable the new culture and approach to be integrated inside the organization.

Strategic design thinking can power corporate strategy in many ways. Having realized that, more and more organizations are creating a chief design officer role and a top-management position.

Example: PepsiCo Chief Design Officer is tasked to inject design thinking into nearly every aspect of the business,  to oversee design-led innovation across all the company’s brands, and to create an organization where design can thrive. PepsiCo leveraged design to create meaningful and relevant brand experiences for their customers any time they interact with PepsiCo's portfolio of products. "Our work covers each brand’s visual identity, from the product itself all the way to the marketing and merchandising activities that bring a brand to life across different platforms—music, sports, fashion, and so forth. This applies not only to the current portfolio of products, but also to PepsiCo’s future portfolio. That’s where our work is really about innovation. I strongly believe that design and innovation are exactly the same thing. Design is more than the aesthetics and artifacts associated with products; it’s a strategic function that focuses on what people want and need and dream of, then crafts experiences across the full brand ecosystem that are meaningful and relevant for customers," says Mauro Porcini, the first-ever PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer.

PROTOTYPES Speed Up the Innovation Process
Design, as any innovation, relies on the prototyping process. Without a prototype, p
eople can talk and talk about a new design for ages. A prototype of something that never existed before excites people, inspires collaboration and speeds up the innovation process. It unlocks resources and sponsorship engagement.

HOLISTIC DESIGNS Inspire Cross-functional Collaboration
Holistic design of an innovative product, service or solution and turning it to a systemic innovation 360 can align the full organization around it.


which can create a lot of value inside organizations because it aligns the full organization around one idea. For instance, if I say “knife,” you are going to visualize a kind of knife. I’m going to visualize another knife, and if there were other people in the room, they would visualize many different kinds of knives. But if I design a knife right now, I align everybody around that knife. Let’s say that in the room there is a marketer who tells me the brand is not visible enough. There is an ergonomist who tells me the handle is not comfortable enough. There is a scientist who tells me the blade is not sharp enough. These are not mistakes. They’re not failures in the process. They’re how prototyping surfaces issues that don’t emerge in the abstract. That’s the power of design and prototyping.

 

Entrepreneurial Creativity: Yin and Yang  Download PowerPoint presentation, pdf e-book

Master of Business Synergies Download PowerPoint presentation, pdf e-book

A book for design and creative professionals. The field of strategic design is growing. More and more organizations are asking designers to apply their principles, practices, tools and methods to help co-define and co-implement their (innovation) strategies and help organizations to become design-led.

Strategic Design is about application of design principles and practices to guide business design, strategy development and implementation toward innovative outcomes that benefit all stakeholders.

"Fluent in visual representation, the strategic designer uses this skill as an important and iterative means of communicating complex, even contradictory, relationships"

Stewardship
Good ideas are easy to come by: implementing the right ones is not. In recent years, the emphasis on “design thinking” has powerfully demonstrated the value of applying creativity in a business context.

But successful design is not only about creative thinking. It also involves implementation and ensuring that key ideas maintain their integrity during that process. Designers must be involved over the duration of change processes, providing constant expertise and feedback to identify, test, and deliver durable solutions.

 

❶ Understanding industry transformation

Conceptualizing the core knowledge asset

Understanding customer needs and benefits  >>>

Changing the existing logic 

Developing an overall direction

Developing strategy for both the short and long term  >>>

Adapting strategy constantly to opportunities and learning

Learning SWOT Questions

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT (Ten3 Mini-course)

 

 

 

Strategic Business Design    Strategic Innovation

Creative Visualization

Critical Question Analysis

6 Keys To Effective Strategic Planning Meeting