Corporate Collective Creativity

After 15 years of design research as a growing and now dominating force within the business of developing products and services of real value for the consumer, the question about what’s next is beginning to rise.

As the power and methods of design research is becoming known by everybody who wants be sure to make money in a world of ‘more products faster’, it is obvious that we all need to find the next tool or weapon in the battle to develop the next big thing, before the competition.

Here’s my bet, and I’ll be blogging a bit about that for a while, because I think it is explosive… Corporate Collective Creativity. With design research as a standard process we need to look for a new creative potential to release. We believe that potential could easily be the vast research and innovation resources that exists within every company – but that usually stays largely untapped due to a variety of organisational, psychological and even physical reasons.

Most senior designers have years of experience with being two things: design developers – and facilitators of processes that synthesizes the right framework for the innovation work. Almost always painfully ignorant to the specific project designers gather information from the market and from inside the client’s organisation … where they often find many of the answers already – inside the organisation, right under the client’s nose, usually, though, well hidden or just not actively seeking to become of value. Simply because the organization does not recognize the value or is able to facilitate it.

If the corporate world can learn to activate and cultivate the vast research and innovation resources inside their organisation, the speed and precision of development can be seriously increased. We believe they can learn that from us and our colleagues in the design business.