Nico Macdonald provides a comprehensive review of the recent Competitiveness Summit at the UK Design Council. Here's a quick taste:
Innovation "will dictate the economic prosperity of nations," Cox observed, but the weakness of the UK is "not being able to take full advantage of this." We produce people in art schools who don't understand the language of the business world, he noted, and business people who don't understand how to manage innovation. How can we combine their skills?
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The conference clearly pulled in a panel of top names some of whom are practicing what they preach and have a good understanding of the way in which design has evolved over the last decade and recognise that as a discipline it plays an important; yet not exclusive, role in the innovation process.
The issues surrounding the role of design and the positive impact it can have on UK competitiveness are the same as they have always been. The key issue, upheld once again by Nico’s observations, is the failure to convince industry that the engagement of a designer in the early innovation process is a missed opportunity.
So we have to ask why industry remains unconvinced particularly in light of such high profile success stories of design-led firms such as Apple, Nokia and so forth.
British Design Innovation which operates a collaborative innovation membership involving all the key parties involved in the innovation space (university PhD’s; strategic designers, entrepreneurs, mid to corporate brand owners, technologists, and deal makers) has an understanding of the business needs and issues facing each of the innovation parties. Thereby we have some informed observations to make regard the role of design in the collaborative innovation process.
By promoting ‘design’ one is actually promoting the discipline required to resolve and implement known business issues and opportunities – when in reality we should be promoting the uniqueness of applied thinking of strategic designers who engaged as team members at the outset of the innovation process discover opportunities and have the skills to translate them into broad market applications to be validated in partnership with the skills of the other innovation parties.
Design itself is such a broad church applied to everything from fluffy cushions to jet engines. Thereby a re-evaluation of the skills and knowledge of the designers and a deep re-classification of particular expertise would enable industry to determine the expertise and knowledge they wish to employ.
Designers themselves complain of being treated as a commodity purchase and yet they too are guilty of perpetuating the difficulty industry has in determining how best to engage with them.
Designers most often present their service based on ‘here’s one I made earlier’ rather than this is the knowledge I brought to the party that resulted in discovering new opportunity, resolving a business, legislative, social or environmental issue.
That said, the latter set of skills actually only belong to a certain set of designers – the multi-skilled, consumer-focused strategic thinkers with more than 10 years experience of working across multi-sectors, and taking disparate sets of often complex information and translating it into market applications.
Those skills most often lie with product designers, interaction and service designers, and high level strategic-led brand consultants. And the firms that bring that combination of skills together either in-house or through genuine project collaborations have the most to offer to the innovation process.
Another issue to be addressed is the ingrained nature of designers to take every industry interaction as an opportunity to respond directly to a design brief.
The designers who claim to be innovation led design strategists must resist their natural desire to immediately think design solution.
They need to fundamentally separate their design solution and implementation service from their strategic ‘creative knowledge transfer’ service. That is, put the horse in front of the cart.
In the early stage innovation process an organisation is not in a position to engage ‘design services’ indeed many designers complain of receiving a design brief only to have to go back several stages to unpick it as fundamental opportunities have been over-looked.
However, trying to impart their knowledge after all the decisions have been taken and a brief concluded with a time to market deadline, is most often far too late.
Thereby if designers want to be engaged at the outset of the innovation process where they can truly make a difference, they need to offer strategic expertise and creative knowledge transfer as a forerunner to their design concept and implementation skills.
And they ought to be prepared to be paid for imparting that knowledge and adding value at the early innovation stage to gain industry respect when they propose a more viable proposition than the original client idea. They should also be honest enough to walk away from non-viable propositions.
The design industry is going through a paradigm shift and it will be led by the most intelligent, skilled, honest and the brave.
There will always be a requirement for engagement of other designers and design disciplines for the production of quality graphics and marketing collateral right across the spectrum. And their engagement by marketing and brand managers may well be based on price and the creative content of their back catalogue.
In conclusion I need to say to all those who represent, promote and seek to encourage industry to engage designers as a competitive UK plc advantage that the time has come to understand that design is a creative discipline engaged to translate strategy into visual solutions that gain stakeholder buy-in but the design profession is not one homogenous lump.
The competitive advantage will be gained by engaging strategic designers and their multi-sector, multi-disciplinary expertise to transfer creative knowledge to the early collaborative innovation process.
Perhaps what we need is an Innovation Council that brings together the collaborative players in the innovation space. The only parties from the design profession who would then engage with it are those who understand their collaborative role within the innovation process and have the knowledge and expertise to gain the respect of the other parties.
So Graham Hitchen is heading down the right road but instead of the International design/business exchange he proposes perhaps he could consider revising that to an International Innovation Exchange. Design is already a fundamental partner to innovation - it does not need (in my opinion) to be singled out. Single it out and it might remain perceived as a ‘special add-on’; integrate it and designers take their place in the collaborative innovation space.
In an attempt to prove the theory BDI has launched Open Innovation Challenge which brings together strategic designers with industry, technologists, the sciences and humanities to work together to resolve business, social and environmental issues.