CASD project— CRISP Magazine # 1
Using the strategic role of design to strengthen the competitive position of Product Service Systems and industrial design providers.
Giulia Calabretta
The innovation game has changed; the pace is quicker, the playing field is larger, and it’ s crowded with adversaries and allies. Businesses playing this game are faced with many strategic decisions: of product portfolio management, of innovation strategy, and of business diversification, to name but a few. Each of these decisions has a highly uncertain outcome, often involves a prolonged course of action, and necessitates significant resource commitment. The traditional approach to making these decisions would be to gather and assess all pertinent information, evaluate costs and benefits, and ultimately reach a decision based on conscious and rational deliberation. But in this new game, filled with uncertainty, complexity, and hidden interdependencies, this rational approach alone no longer suffices.
In our research, we suggest that businesses teamup with design partners to deal with the new rules of the innovation game and ensure that they keep winning at it. Design consultants often struggle to claim this role as innovation partners, given business’ preconceptions of their skills and the difficulty connecting their work to the Key Performance Indicators that business managers are so fond of. Our research offers an answer to this struggle by exploring how design consultancies add value to their clients by improving their decision-making in the turbulent innovation playing field. Thus, design consultants don’ t influence their clients’ KPIs directly, but indirectly by improving their clients’ decision-making capability.
Designers can use and make visuals to open up a discussion. This example shows two companies that used to be one and still have to
Crisp Magazine # 1
work as one. They know each other at the board level, but are complete strangers at the frontline.( Peter Quirijnen for DesignThinkers)
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Unlike the firms who hire them, design consultancies are more likely to use an intuitive decision-making approach that, while encompassing the same building blocks as rationality— problem definition, analysis, and synthesis – is faster, often subconscious and deeply intertwined. Intuition relies on chunks of knowledge accumulated by decision makers over time and on their ability to generate solutions by recognising patterns and making holistic associations. Unlike rational decision-makers, whose effectiveness is largely determined by collecting and assessing as much information as possible, intuitive decision-makers rely more on meaningfully selecting and connecting new information with the knowledge they already have. In situations where time is scarce and information is never complete— as is often the case in the innovation game, the latter approach can be more efficient and successful. Rational decision-makers also have a tendency to approach new problems as variations of previously experienced problems. This might bias their decisionmaking towards incremental innovation.