Design Driven Innovation

Firms, managers and scholars have often balanced between two approaches to innovation: user centered (where incremental innovation is pulled by the market) and technology push (where innovation comes from breakthrough development in technologies). However there is a third relevant path to innovation: Design driven innovation, i.e. the radical innovation of product meanings. This innovation doesn’t emerge from current user needs, but is a new vision, a proposal developed by a manufacturer that radically redefines what a product could mean for people. Corporations that succeed in creating these proposals, that go beyond what customers currently ask for but that in the future they will be excited to buy, are those corporations that lead the innovation game, build strong brands and have products with longer life cycle than competitors.

How a corporation may realize design driven innovations? Research of Roberto Verganti in this field has started ten years ago by investigating successful Italian manufacturers in design-intensive industries. His analysis has then extended to international corporations in different industries. His research shows that design driven innovation is based on interaction with communities of interpreters (manufacturers in other industries, designers, architects, schools, artists, craftsmen, magazines, technology suppliers, etc… ), i.e. with what we he calls a “design discourse” that surrounds every firm. Roberto has investigated and modelled this research process (that is significantly different, sometimes opposite, from the popular user-centered process) in order to provide guidelines, methods and examples on how to absorb knowledge from innovation interpreters, develop a novel vision, and diffuse it into the market.