There's innovation right under your nose!
Design is a multi-vitamin that gives you super powers and makes you and your team far more innovative and impactful. And the leading brands and businesses have realized earlier than others that design is far more than good-looking.
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” This line by Buckminster Fuller probably sums up the power of Business Design/Venture Design.
In Venture Design, we believe this “emergence” is what helps transform often unicellular ideas into launch ready products, services, platforms & experiences. Some call this the metamorphosis of ideas into tangible futures.
The innate ability of the Venture & Business Design practice to create form, function and flavours makes it a serious competitive advantage for businesses both new & old and for founders starting up. Especially, given that we live in an experience economy. Here even a soap case needs to be designed well to be chosen by a customer.
How can design thinking and design doing simplify innovation at work or in business?
Design thinking builds alignment as insights around the product or service are translated into design criteria (the making criteria). It helps move the product team / founder team toward convergence around what really matters to users, what makes customers’ lives better with your product or service - be it digital or physical.
Design doing takes over to grow serious desirability for products, services or ventures. This helps create and grow their unique character and build a high degree of differentiation which helps them stand out in a sea of sameness. By shaping and aligning form, function & flavour, design makes your experience/product desirable.
When should you incorporate design into a venture? At inception, to get maximum results.
Design should be thought of at inception and not as an afterthought. Design should be part of the starter-pack if you are building a venture or a product or platform. Often new ventures or products get obsessed about minimum viability but that doesn’t ensure that the product will be desirable enough to be picked/chosen/loved.
Why so? There is a practical reason to it. After all, a product or service can be both viable and feasible but these are increasingly becoming table stakes and first line defences in the world today. Viability and feasibility by themselves don’t compel choice.
What really helps exceptional products/services get chosen in a market full of such viable/feasible products & services is their desirability. And this is what Venture Design helps develop and deliver. And deliver on both - the balance sheet and the creativity score card.
Design in many quarters is seen through a narrow lens. Typically, the lens of “good looks”. If you believe that design only helps making things beautiful, then here is your design alert. You are somewhat right but also very wrong. And in an experience economy, in the entrepreneurial universe, the lack of this multi-vitamin can be devastating.
Design and its unique ability to drive character, differentiation and relevance is becoming increasingly felt. In a world of sameness, where millions of new products & services struggle to be unique, desirable and then be chosen, it is design that becomes the true differentiator.
Picture any of the exceptional products and experiences that come to your mind. And chances are design makes its strong presence felt. Why is design often so productive and impactful? Good design does this by being acutely conscious and focused on what makes the user experience happier and more productive. Be it while inventing the new or reinventing the old.
As a practice today, design (both thinking & doing) plays a centre-forward role in many of the functions - Innovation, Strategy, Product Design & Development, Experience transformation, Brand & Market Development, Communication & Content.
Why so? Just look around for the answer.
The world is increasingly becoming more design conscious. Soap cases, car keys, mobile phones, store experience, merchandise and packaging. Design and insightful good design that persuades and influences customers is all around us, across sectors and industries.
A customer's experience with good design makes her/him fall out of love with those products & services that don’t quite make the grade with their design and experience quotient. And this has an adverse impact on growth, productivity and profitability in those businesses.
But the good news is, one can be never too late (though sometimes, it could, in fact be).
Every design step your business or organisation takes today, compounds its success and growth multifold.
Customers spurning new products, brands failing to attract customer love, visitors finding your experience not intuitive enough, apps struggling to rise above mediocrity, websites not delivering on productivity, associates not inspired enough to discover new futures and new initiatives failing to get traction and revenue. These are all what we call as design alerts. The market/s are giving a signal to act.
So what do you do with design alerts?‼️
(1) For starters, take design out of the box, out of its templates. Design has an incredible ability to build beautiful products and services, transform experiences and create impact for communities. Increasingly so customers and users are getting used to expect well designed products and services - and this is becoming a non-compromise. But this ability of design to transform and trance-form is a function of how much you stretch it as a practice.
In our experience as a venture design house, our adventures have taken us across use cases, sectors and industries - product and platform design, new business creation, place making & destination building, making exceptional brands and delivering impact for communities.
(2) Make design practice a lead function of your business’s strategic toolbox. By working with venture design teams you can truly multiply your organization's ability to innovate and conceptualize
Design is a multi-vitamin that gives you super powers and makes you and your team far more innovative and impactful. And the leading brands and businesses have realized earlier than others that design is far more than good-looking. And yes at the same time, it does makes things more beautiful.
Why would we call design a multi-vitamin?
After all this is a practice that actually delivers on four key parameters - viability, feasibility, desirability and creativity. This is the ability of design while being versatile enough to co-work with other skills and faculties.
So next time, you are looking at decoding design led innovation or wondering how to make your products or services exceptionally desirable or more impactful, consider Venture Design as an ally. It helps deliver minimum desirable products. And very often exceptionally designed experiences.
As a business, a maker, a founder, a brand or as an organisation one has to creatively reimagine every day. For out of syllabus problems, you need out of the box solutions, exceptional products and services. This requires entrepreneurial design partners to help you bring transformative ideas to life.
Ventures designers can help your business and organisation innovate and be agile in getting ideas to prototype or market. A multidisciplinary collective and founder-friendly technology by your side can simplify your work in designing the new or reimagining the old.
