Championing Design: Perspectives on Design Capabilities

Abstract

Introduction to the Design Leadership ChallengeThis paper addresses the leadership problem of expanding a firm's dynamic capability in design.More than a decade ago, marketing guru Philip Kotler and his co-author (1984) noticed that design is a powerful but neglected strategic tool.Although new professional design investments can pay back (Roy and Potter 1994), ample evidence suggests that the potential of design is rarely fully exploited by business (Walsh, et al. 1992)."Rarely" means that some do explore and exploit design profitably.Notable cases can be seen even at the very start of this century, such as industrial design pioneer Peter Behren's work for the German AEG, which included products and well-designed corporate communications.Interestingly, such rare cases of outstanding design/business relations tend to emerge through a particular advocacy of company leaders and designers' creative initiatives-for example, through initiatives by leading forces like De Pree, Gilbert Rohde, George Nelson, and Charles Eames at American Herman Miller (Heskett 1980;Blaich 1993).A bold driving force to advance design seems to be crucial and somewhat overlooked and it is thus the key point explored in this article.Organizing and managing design is not easy.Few firms possess a sufficiently advanced and rich design competence to meet the new challenges of the knowledge-based and digitized economy.Industrial design may serve as an illuminating case.Although multiple media tools are now available for rapid model projection, industrial design is still mostly unfamiliar, and it is a rare expertise in most business settings (Svengren 1995;Jevnaker 1996).Even more rare is the managerial ability to connect to, and capitalize on, these creative competencies in design and its management.Design expertise and design-related business expertise are embodied in specialists, as well as embedded-or dispersed-in multiple layers of the organization and its networks (Walsh, et al. 1992).Design is also located beyond companies' networks-for example, in a diverse range of design consultancies, which makes buying design difficult (Bruce and Morris 1998).Moreover, complex industrial design typically needs to be informed by business 1 and market factors in order to pursue suitable directions for creative problem-finding (Kristensen 1998).Otherwise, misalignments can emerge (Dumas 1993).This raises the leadership challenge of finding, mobilizing, integrating, and creating value with suitable design expertise.How then to relate to something that is partly unknown and equivocal?How do firms organize design strategically-without sufficient à priori knowledge?To explore this paradoxical problem, it is fruitful to take a closer look at exemplary firms' managerial approaches and connections to design.Albeit design is complex and seldom fully exploited, previous research suggests that some firms organize and direct design successfully (DMI 1989;Finiw 1992; Svengren 1995), often by building long-term relations with a design source (Bruce and Jevnaker 1998).I suggest those design-experience-rich cases of design/business pairs, whether AEG/Behrens, Yamaha/GK, Steelcase/IDEO, or less famous corporate names, could be valuable for new treasure builders-if we could learn from their somewhat secret design/business relationships.Grounded in a set of real-life cases, this paper first examines how firms can become capable of advancing their design approach.We especially delineate the kind of leadership activities that were found underlying the firm's organizing design capability.Interestingly, behind all the best cases, individuals acted as persistent design promoters, providing the

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