Design Driven Innovation

Until now, the literature on innovation has focused either on radical innovation pushed by technology or incremental innovation pulled by the market. In Design-Driven Innovation: How to Compete by Radically Innovating the Meaning of Products, Roberto Verganti introduces a third strategy, a radical shift in perspective that introduces a bold new way of competing. Design-driven innovations do not come from the market; they create new markets. They don't push new technologies; they push new meanings. It's about having a vision, and taking that vision to your customers. Think of game-changers like Nintendo's Wii or Apple's iPod. They overturned our understanding of what a video game means and how we listen to music. Customers had not asked for these new meanings, but once they experienced them, it was love at first sight. But where does the vision come from? With fascinating examples from leading European and American companies, Verganti shows that for truly breakthrough products and services, we must look beyond customers and users to those he calls "interpreters" - the experts who deeply understand and shape the markets they work in. Design-Driven Innovation offers a provocative new view of innovation thinking and practice.

Roberto Verganti's fascinating analysis will stimulate all thoughtful business readers, students, and practitioners alike. This passionate and keenly observed book offers a valuable and provocative new view, and will be a fundamental reference for all those interested in design and determined to pursue innovation as a driving factor in their profession. -- Luca di Montezemolo, Chairman Ferrari S.p.A. and Fiat S.p.A. Every manager interested in innovation should read this book. The perspectives it provides will make a crucial difference to managers in the twenty-first century. -- Marco Iansiti, David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; coauthor of The Keystone Advantage Verganti shares powerful insights into both the process and value of design-driven innovation, to the benefit of business leaders and, ultimately, the customers we serve. -- Brian C. Walker, President and CEO, Herman Miller Inc. Can design save the world? No, but it can definitely help make it better, especially if integrated within the systems that already have direct impact on the economy and on policy making. Roberto Verganti belongs to a small group of enthusiastic experts and interpreters that have set out to explain the culture of design to the powerful but unaware, so that they can appreciate its full potential. -- Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

Branding can inspire innovation in products and services, creating value for organizations and consumers alike. This in turn can lead to a durable relationship between brands and customers. Brand-driven Innovation explores branding theory and its relation to innovation, in order to provide readers with a solid foundation of knowledge. The book employs a practical, four-step method that will help readers apply brand-driven innovation in their own academic or business context.

This textbook aims to guide, instruct and inspire the next generation of innovation designers, managers and leaders. Building upon an evidence-based innovation development process, it introduces, explains and provides visual models and case examples of what Business Design is, how it is applied across sectors and organizations, and its impact on decision-making and value creation. Students will read and analyze design-led innovation business cases from across the globe, discover multi-disciplinary strategies (from marketing to anthropology) and practice applying a designer’s toolkit to find, frame, and solve business problems in contemporary ways. Throughout the book, students will break down the process of innovation and move from initiation to implementation, engage in iterative feedback loops, and develop concrete plans for personal and professional collaboration and workplace application. For MBA and senior undergraduate students, this book offers a step-by-step and comprehensive reference guide to creative problem framing and solving – inside and beyond the classroom. It integrates marketing principles and management frameworks, with anthropological and design methods reflecting the diverse and in-demand skills vital to tomorrow’s workforce. For instructors, this book offers a way to confidently engage learners in the realm of design practices and strategies relevant to business decision-making. The pedagogical framework, along with a comprehensive suite of techniques and templates, offers both novice and experienced teachers a step-by-step reference guide that facilitates skills development in creative problem framing and solving.

This open access book represents one of the key milestones of DESIGNSCAPES, an H2020 CSA (Coordination and Support Action) research project funded by the European Commission under the Call “User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation”. The book demonstrates that adopting design allows us to embed innovation within the city so as to arrive at feasible answers to complex global challenges. In this way, innovation can become disruptive, while also sparking a dynamic of gradual change in the “urbanscape” it acts within. To explore this potential, the book puts forward the concept of “design enabled innovation in urban environments” and examines the part that the city can play in promoting and facilitating the adoption of design among public and private sector innovators. This leads to a potential evaluation framework in which a given urbanscape is assessed both in terms of its capacity for generating innovation, and of the nature (more or less design-dependent or design-prone) of the innovative initiatives it hosts. This thread of reasoning holds many promising implications, including a possible “third way” between those who dream of an alternative economic model where revenues and growth are sacrificed on the altar of social and environmental respect, and the supporters of the traditional market-based view, who feel it is enough to add a touch of responsibility and concern to a system that should continue rewarding the profitability of innovations.

Trend-Driven Innovation Beat accelerating customer expectations. Every business leader, entrepreneur, innovator, and marketer wants to know where customers are headed. The problem? The received wisdom on how to find out is wrong. In this startling new book, the team at TrendWatching share a powerful, counter-intuitive truth: to discover what people want next, stop looking at customers and start looking at businesses. That means learning how to draw powerful insights from the way leading brands and disruptive startups—from Apple to Uber, Chipotle to Patagonia—redefine customer expectations. Sharing the secrets that have led thousands of the world's most successful brands and agencies to rely on TrendWatching for over a decade, Trend-Driven Innovation is the book that will reconfigure your view of the business world forever. You'll learn: How to spot emerging trends using three crucial building blocks, and how to recognize the expectation gaps that herald opportunity. Why most professionals focus on precisely the wrong trends and innovations, and how to avoid this. How to turn trends and insights into innovations that customers will love. Amid the endless change that defines today's business environment, opportunity is everywhere. Highly practical, and featuring real-world examples from around the world, Trend-Driven Innovation is the actionable, battle-tested manual that will enable you harness those opportunities time after time. Setting you up to build an organization that matters, products customers love, and campaigns people can't stop talking about.

A more powerful innovation, which seeks to discover not how things work but why we need things. The standard text on innovation advises would-be innovators to conduct creative brainstorming sessions and seek input from outsiders—users or communities. This kind of innovating can be effective at improving products but not at capturing bigger opportunities in the marketplace. In this book Roberto Verganti offers a new approach—one that does not set out to solve existing problems but to find breakthrough meaningful experiences. There is no brainstorming—which produces too many ideas, unfiltered—but a vision, subject to criticism. It does not come from outsiders but from one person's unique interpretation. The alternate path to innovation mapped by Verganti aims to discover not how things work but why we need things. It gives customers something more meaningful—something they can love. Verganti describes the work of companies, including Nest Labs, Apple, Yankee Candle, and Philips Healthcare, that have created successful businesses by doing just this. Nest Labs, for example, didn't create a more advanced programmable thermostat, because people don't love to program their home appliances. Nest's thermostat learns the habits of the household and bases its temperature settings accordingly. Verganti discusses principles and practices, methods and implementation. The process begins with a vision and proceeds through developmental criticism, first from a sparring partner and then from a circle of radical thinkers, then from external experts and interpreters, and only then from users. Innovation driven by meaning is the way to create value in our current world, where ideas are abundant but novel visions are rare. If something is meaningful for both the people who create it and the people who consume it, business value follows.