What is Business Design?

An empirical definition of Business Design and my objectives for the road ahead:

“Every product has a meaning. Yet many companies do not care about how to innovate meanings. They strive to understand how people currently give meaning to things – only to discover that this meaning has been suggested by an innovation designed by a competitor.” – Roberto Verganti, Design Driven Innovation. 

Business Design attributes to the design of a product, service or experience where the creator engages the clientele satisfying their functional and emotional quotients. Innovation is the key, for without innovation even top-notch companies have been wiped off and have been rendered non-competent (quoting the case of Kodak or the more recent Blackberry fallout for instance). 

A Business Designer should ideally create manifestations that motivate enterprises and incite consumers. While innovation is paramount, the foundation of traditional corporate strategies has to be adhered to create a coherent outcome to help clients create avenues for market growth ideally exponential in nature. It is about translating the conceptual blueprint of a firm, interrelationships between the firm's major processes, main resources and competencies required in achieving its objectives into alluring propositions to its customers.

“The real innovation, however, was not just the hybrid electric motor but the large,colorful information display that gives drivers a minute-by-minute indication of fuel economy, constantly challenging them to improve the fuel efficiency of their driving”. 

On introspection of this quote by Tim Brown in Change by Design, such a breakthrough changed course of psychological and physiological actions pertaining to the automotive industry that amplified the importance of fuel efficiency and eliminated the uncertainties of re-fueling for the users. Proactive development of technology is the order of the day, posing huge challenges to designers, making the design thinking mindset absolutely vital for the success of an organization. 

The design thinking process aids in generating a multitude of ideas that are funneled through and further extracted into a coherent plan of action right from commencement to culmination in all domains of its life cycle. Great ideas and innovations are hardly a matter of chance but a consequence of meticulous striving.

According to Bruce Mau, “Massive Change” embodies the thesis that “design has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all ecology and economies are becoming global, relational and interconnected. 

In order to understand these emerging forces, there is an urgent need to articulate precisely what we are doing to ourselves and to our world.” The majority interpret design visually - beautiful objects, for instance and miss out on fundamental layers of the cumulative process. Great minds perceive design in an unconventional way. 

Ideally the design process used to produce beautiful phenomena is to be applied to business, institutions, events and experiences - just about anything that might benefit from this creative approach - to solve problems and bring about positive change, a cogitation thoroughly inspired by Bruce Mau.

“We believed that design thinking for business broke down into three essential components: (1) deep and holistic user understanding; (2) visualization of new possibilities, prototyping, and refining; and (3) the creation of a new activity system to bring the nascent idea to reality and profitable operation.” 

“Rather than perpetuate the past, the design thinker creates the future.”- Roger Martin, The Design of Business. These quotes to me are an accurate summation of what design thinking stands for and what a business designer must constantly strive for.

“Because when the law implicitly or explicitly limits internal competition and bars new entrants, businesses have little, if any, incentive to innovate. As a result, regulated businesses—which include public utilities, air travel, defence, health care, and food and drugs—have fallen dangerously far behind in adopting exponential technologies. Once the disruptors do find a way in, collapse is that much more sudden.” ― Larry Downes, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation.

 This quote is an explicit reminder against complacence and induced dormancy and that even current market dominators have to constantly keep innovating in order to retain their competitive advantage.

To state from outside the scope of reading, I have always been inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote, “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” The cerebration inspired by this quote drives me to define the ideal Business Design process as a precise scrutiny of each of the existing primary and support activities of the firm, their innovation, incorporation of new value chain accompaniments where necessary and predominantly conceive an offering that exceeds expectations of the end consumers eventually leading to its adoption and adoration.

During the course of my existence, the realm of business design has progressed from its incunabulum to a sophisticated and dynamic field capable of transforming any industry. Business Design, I strongly believe is a perfect combination of science and art. 

Being an Engineer Copywriter and Marketer Brandologist with a zest vested in Business Design, my objective is to spark off a neoteric stream called Business Design Engineering. In the course of the next five years I shall look to employ my acumen derived from six years of professional experience and academic insight to take on the entrepreneurial route. Through them business ventures I aspire to bring positive change in the socio-economic realms of humanity.