Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean

These companies instead search for new possibilities that are consistent with the evolution of sociocultural phenomena but that are not there until a company transforms them into products and proposes them to people. They look for the seeds that they can cultivate into blossoms.

These companies are instead making proposals, putting forward a vision. That is why I call this strategy design-driven: like radical innovation of technologies, it is a push strategy.

When more than 30 percent of the population belongs to the creative class, as Richard Florida has suggested, creativity is not in short supply: it is abundant.3 What is in short supply, I’m afraid, are circles of forward-looking researchers whom firms involve in breakthrough projects because of their culture and vision, and because they have someth

It has not provided people with an improved interpretation of what they already mean by, and expect from, a lamp: a more beautiful object. Rather, the company has proposed a different and unexpected meaning: a light that makes you feel better. This meaning, unsolicited, was what people were actually waiting for.

Companies that produce design-driven innovations highly value their interactions with these interpreters. With them they exchange information on scenarios, test the robustness of their assumptions, and discuss their own visions. These companies understand that knowledge about meanings is diffused throughout their external environment; that they are

Innovating design requires managers to ask, What is the deepest reason people buy our product? Why is it meaningful to them? And most of all, How can we gratify people and make them more content by providing products that suggest new meanings? I know you can immediately provide a long list of answers to these questions. However, I would not be surp

These innovations do not question dominant meanings but simply refresh and further reinforce them. This is the domain of style.

Where are these relational assets located? First, they reside in your entire organization. Often firms, especially large corporations, already have numerous interactions with potential key interpreters. However, they do not have a picture of this multitude of personal relationships, do not nurture them, and have no process for converting them into

A product’s language is its material, texture, smell, name, and, of course, form (style is only one aspect of a product’s language).