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.

On my recent vacation in Egypt I saw this ATM. I needed money, but I still walked around for almost an hour to find a bank that I felt looked reasonably safe and trustworthy.

A bank with an armed guard outside gave me more confidence that I wouldn’t get cheated than with the ATM shown in the picture.

How does this translate into design? First of all, the company producing the ATM has absolutely no understanding of the problems and challenges their client, the bank, has. And the bank has no understanding of their client, the person walking up to an ATM.

Just few days of channel service analysis might have saved all 3 parties (manufacturer, bank and client) from embarrasment, distrust and annoyance.

If a designer had been involved in the process, the manufacturer could have found a better solution for the banks challenges, the clients would still feel confident about the banks services and the bank would make more money.

Who should now feel cheated?

If companies really want to innovate, it’s time they invited designers to join their boards of directors.

Denmark should almost design its BNP, according to the government. Growth and welfare should largely be borne by design and ideas in our ‘creative nation’, where innovation is on all businesses’ strategic agenda.

But how many businesses have innovation experts on their board of directors today?

I mean really idea-centric people who live from seeing possibilities everywhere? Design types with a Richard Branson gene who dare use their intuition to drive growth?

Few, in reality. Most boards of directors at Danish companies are ‘cast’ on a self-affirming and not necessarily idea-generating principle: too many people who think in the same way, even though they seemingly often disagree. Too little contrast and too much ‘group think’.

The idea person is missing

Funnily enough, one profile always seems to be missing – the idea person. Him or her whose natural instinct is to think off-the-wall from a business perspective. A professional who gives decision-makers the courage and ideas to grasp new opportunities, even when this requires a change in strategy. Someone whose job is to innovate – to generate ‘the next big thing’ by creating tension between opposing fields of expertise.

Look at the new generation of big Danish design companies who are growing rapidly in terms of business and competencies right now. Here are some of the most strategic-creative talents Denmark has to offer.

On board already

Many of them already work strategically at management level in businesses in Denmark and abroad. This is a huge potential that’s merely waiting to be harnessed as a catalyst on boards of directors. If this happens, the design mindset will be well and truly anchored in the mindset of boards of directors – and contribute strategically at a far higher level than is the case today.

Look also at the Danish Design Association, recently founded at the Danish Chamber of Commerce’s offices at Børsen in Copenhagen. This trade association will put the new, more international and more business-orientated design concept on the nation’s business map. At the same time it will move much of the design sector out of the ‘drawing office’ and in a more professional, strategic and market-orientated direction – namely, by joining boards of directors.

In other words: let the designers in – it’s time for business as unusual.