Economic Sciences/6. Marketing and Management

Krystyna Sokhanych

Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine

Impact of product design at global companies performance

Many of the world’s most successful brands create breakthrough ideas that are inspired by a deep understanding of consumers’ lives and use the principles of design to innovate and build value.

How to make design to be a drill for the successful companies performance? At the very beginning the company should begin involving design thinkers at the very start of the innovation process, before any direction has been set. Design thinking will help explore more ideas more quickly. The company should create an expectation or rapid experimentation and prototyping. It is important to encourage teams to create a prototype in the first week of a project and measure the progress with a metric such as average time to first prototype or number of consumers exposed to prototypes during the life of a product. [1]

The global companies performance depends on managing a portfolio of innovation that stretches from shorter-term incremental ideas to longer-term revolutionary ones. Expecting business units to drive and fund incremental innovation but be willing to initiative revolutionary innovation from the top.

Looking for the talents is a very important part of successful performance in terms of design. People with more conventional design backgrounds can push solutions far beyond your expectations. You may even be able to train nondesigners with the right attributes to excel in design-thinking roles.

In many businesses people move every 12 to 18 months. But design projects may take longer than that to get from day one through implementation. Planning assignments so that design thinkers go from inspiration to ideation to implementation is important. Experiencing the full cycle builds better judgment and creates great long-term benefits for the company. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Design thinking process.

Source: Compiled by the author based on data from [1]

Thinking as a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes – and even strategy. The perfect example is an Apple corporation, which has been considered a leading designer and integrator of computer hardware and software since being founded in 1976. Apple’s success was not just the result of clever strategic moves or an innate sense of market timing. It came from a deep commitment to understanding how people used computing devices and a desire to develop “insanely great products with great design”.

Good design does not always equal good business. But good business outcomes—especially when the goal is to create new sources of value in the world—are most often achieved through a well-structured design process that is more holistic and inclusive than the notion of good design. [2]

During creation and innovation entrepreneurs with design thinking define the challenge. Develop a set of powerful questions to surface opportunities, and frame innovation.

They gather data and learn how to gather data through qualitative research such as observation and storytelling to augment traditional forms of data gathering.  Tools include Journey Mapping and Value chain analysis. Managers reframe and clarify the challenge, which make sense of research by seeing patterns, themes, and larger relationships between the information. Challenge assumptions and illuminate opportunities latent within the organization.

They cultivate intuition and develop aesthetic ways of knowing. The elegant solution wins in the marketplace. Then develop visual thinking skills to de-code images, and communicate ideas visually. Visual literacy transcends the limitations of language, and activates our senses. Tools include Mind mapping, sketching and painting.

They create a visual tangible representation of your idea and present it to the group for feedback. Create feasibility and an adoption checklist to get people onboard and exploring alternative futures with their internal and external customers

Then they gather feedback from prototype. Assess outcomes, and refine the project.

Create an action plan and test-drive the innovation. Finally, assess results, modify and improve.

To conclude everything written above I might say that design plays a major role in a product development as a key success factor which gives any company an opportunity to have a strong competitive advantage.

1. Brown T. Harvard Business Review: “Design Thinking” // 2008 – p.8.

2. Blobmerg Bussinessweek official website – [Online resourse]. – Access: http://www.businessweek.com/