Journal of Business Strategy on design innovation

A special issue of Journal of Business Strategy on ‘The practice of innovation: design in process’, is now available.

There is a great deal of energetic discussion about why design innovation has become critical for the success and growth of businesses today and experts in business management are discussing ways to think about design as a key strategic advantage. This special issue of JBS, edited by Vijay Kumar of the Illinois Institute of Design, brings together experts from many fields to discuss how design innovation can be successfully practiced through adopting formalized design processes. The papers come from innovators in fields as diverse as healthcare, digital products, software, telecommunications, space planning, web services, city planning, and education.

Table of contents

Using design thinking to improve patient experiences in Japanese hospitals: a case study
Taisuke Uehira, Carl Kay (pp. 6-12)
The paper seeks to use a case study to describe work by a Japanese qualitative research specialist with leading office furniture manufacturer to spur innovation in product development and sales strategy in a newly targeted hospital furniture market. It aims to show how qualitative research can allow product development and sales teams to accelerate learning and pace of innovation by providing a window on needs in new market segments from a customer’s point of view.

Innovating health care delivery: the design of health services
Alan K. Duncan, Margaret A. Breslin (pp. 13-20)
The structure of health care financing, the lack of vertical and horizontal integration, and the slow translation of basic research into meaningful health outcomes for the population conspire to make innovation in health service delivery a difficult task. However, health service organizations that can more effectively and systematically understand patient needs – needs that are now poorly understood and often unarticulated – have an intrinsic advantage in delivering high value care. This -paper aims to describe a program for translating those needs into health services innovations.

The call of the city: using design methods to attract families
Kristian Buschmann, Carol Coletta (pp. 21-27)
For the first time in 50 years, young people are coming back to cities. But what happens when they have children? Convention seems to dictate they move to the suburbs where they can find big houses, big yards and good schools. This paper aims to describe how CEOs for Cities and students from the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design took a fresh look at how cities can better serve families.

Pirate this: breakthrough mindsets from the web
Brandon Schauer (pp. 28-39)
The recent mix of economic constraints and new capabilities has encouraged web-based businesses to explore creative new strategies and unusual innovation processes. After years of refining these practices online, a potent set of approaches are surfacing that could transform businesses beyond the web. This paper aims to extract the new business models and practices that might be transferred into other industries to create more agile organizations and engaging customer experiences.

Beyond good: great innovations through design
Steve Sato (pp. 40-49)
The purpose of this paper is to propose that high quality innovations benefit both companies and customers. Most businesses have formal systems to ensure benefit to company, and weaker, informal systems to retain or add value to customers. This paper aims to provide a way to formally apply heuristics designers use (“design thinking”) to maintain a line-of-sight to company and customer needs in all decisions from concept through production. This approach should result in offerings that are compelling to customers and are profitable to companies.

How tangible is your strategy? How design thinking can turn your strategy into reality
Matthew Holloway (pp. 50-56)
Improving your company’s ability to execute its strategy requires increase alignment, greater agility and a singular clarity regarding the desired outcomes. This paper aims to describe how the SAP Design Services Team uses design thinking and its principles to improve the organization’s ability improve its ability to execute strategy and even evolve the way SAP identifies and defines its strategic vision.

Cultural innovation in software design: the new impact of innovation planning methods
Chris Bernard (pp. 57-69)
The purpose of this paper is to describe innovation planning methods used at Microsoft.

The discipline of product discovery: identifying breakthrough business opportunities
Jooyun Melanie Joh, Matthew Mayfield (pp. 70-77)
This paper aims to cover the authors’ experience with applying the latest methodologies in identifying and articulating product opportunities within a large, global corporation and dynamic marketplace.

Embedding innovation: design thinking for small enterprises
Antonia Ward, Ellie Runcie, Lesley Morris (pp. 78-84)
This paper aims to outline the approaches used by the UK Design Council to embed design and innovation capability in small businesses.

Innovation is good, fitness is better
James P. Hackett (pp. 85-90)
Academic journals and the popular business press are filled with articles praising innovation. But innovation is not enough. This paper proposes a higher purpose – that survival of our business systems relies on achieving a new level of fitness – and aims to suggest that design thinking is one of the keys to becoming more fit.

A process for practicing design innovation
Vijay Kumar (pp. 91-100)
Companies are increasingly adopting design processes as a key driver for their innovation practice. Design processes help companies develop innovations that produce high user value as well as economic value and business value. The purpose of this paper is to describe how design processes can be effectively used in innovation projects through a good understanding design principles, tools, and frameworks.

You can buy the whole issue as one pdf for USD 45 or EUR 33.72. You can also purchase individual articles.