How can your company win when the rules keep changing?
Insight works with you to identify your challenges and frame the right opportunities. Our Design Strategy process focuses on aligning creative resources to implement successful solutions.
Define the game where you create the rules.
The current trend among design consultancies is to expand their services by integrating business strategy into their design processes. The result of this is a discipline called design strategy, the recognition that the design of a successful new product, service, or experience requires an understanding of business goals, opportunities, and relationships as well as continued definition of short and long-term design plans. This type of offering supports a traditional business strategy offering which more quantifiably define markets and strategic plans.
Insight has seen many different models of design strategy, and we found that the merging of business and design goals into one process required us to develop an integrated process that strengthened the current design processes and introduced necessary business thinking.
Defining the Principles of Design Strategy
To understand the challenges of design strategy integration we analyzed past client work and relationships. Through this process we found that successful programs consistently incorporated three underlying principles that allowed multi-disciplinary teams to work together to create innovative solutions. These principles, communication, commitment, and context, provide the foundation for successful integration.
Communication refers to the need for all groups to interact and work together towards common goals. In an integrated design strategy program it is necessary to build specific communication activities into the process to ensure groups are connecting in a manner that truly guides appreciation and understanding of the goals.
Commitment refers to the acceptance of potential new opportunities by internal colleagues, external partners, and future consumers in order to gain approval early in the design process, before significant time and money has been committed in only one direction.
Context refers to the parameters of the consumers, the business, and the market that provide the foundation for decision-making. Understanding context allows decision-making that supports what is appropriate for the design, rather then for an individual.
Recognizing these principles as keys to the success of an ongoing relationship between strategy and design allowed us to further develop a comprehensive, integrated process that is both repeatable and scalable across both clients and projects.
Insight’s design strategy has produced outstanding results for our clients. Please contact us for more detailed information on our design strategy process.