Design, Meanings, and Radical Innovation: A Metamodel and a Research Agenda^*

Abstract

Recent studies on design management have helped us to better comprehend how companies can apply design to get closer to users and to better understand their needs; this is an approach usually referred to as user-centered design. Yet analysis of design-intensive manufacturers such as Alessi, Artemide, and other leading Italian firms shows that their innovation process hardly starts from a close observation of user needs and requirements. Rather, they follow a different strategy called design-driven innovation in this paper. This strategy aims at radically change the emotional and symbolic content of products (i.e., their meanings and languages) through a deep understanding of broader changes in society, culture, and technology. Rather than being pulled by user requirements, design-driven innovation is pushed by a firm's vision about possible new product meanings and languages that could diffuse in society. Design-driven innovation, which plays such a crucial role in the innovation strategy of design intensive firms, has still remained largely unexplored. This paper aims at providing a possible direction to fill this empty spot in innovation management literature. In particular, first it proposes a metamodel for investigating design-driven innovation in which a manufacturer's ability to understand, anticipate, and influence emergence of new product meanings is built by relying on external interpreters (e.g., designers, firms in other industries, suppliers, schools, artists, the media) that share its same problem: to understand the evolution of sociocultural models and to propose new visions and meanings. Managing designdriven innovation therefore implies managing the interaction with these interpreters to access, share, and internalize knowledge on product languages and to influence shifts in sociocultural models. Second, the paper proposes a possible direction to scientifically investigate the management of this networked and collective research process. In particular, it shows that the process of creating breakthrough innovations of meanings partially mirrors the process of creating breakthrough technological innovations. Studies of design-driven innovation may therefore benefit significantly from the existing body of theories in the field of technology management. The analysis of the analogies between these two types of radical innovations (i.e., meanings and technologies) allows a research agenda to be set for exploration of design-driven innovation, a relevant as well as underinvestigated phenomenon.Ã This paper is the result of a decade of research on design-driven innovation, which benefited from collaborations and interactions with several scholars. For their insightful inspirations and comments, I gratefully thank Tommaso Buganza, Claudio Dell'Era, and Alessio Marchesi (at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano);

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“…Von Hippel (1986) similarly notes that "lead users" can be a key source of input into the innovation process. Those subscribing to "design-driven innovation" have also made the case that firms that organize technological development around fluid visions, missions or challenges, rather than more rigid targets and principles, can create a symbiotic dialogue that both develops a better product and stimulates market demand (Verganti 2008). Levitt and March (1988) refer to this as "target oriented" organizational learning; Allen (1983) terms this "collective invention."…”

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“…As regards to the symbolic dimension, it has been noted that design can allow persons to express their self-image (e.g. Bloch, 2011;Homburg et al, 2015;Verganti, 2008;Tabeau, Gemser, Hutink, & Wijnberg, 2017). Gruen (2017), for example, highlights the centrality of design as providing sign value helping customers with self-expression and to shape their 'identity(ies)'.…”

Resisting classical solutions: The creative mind of industrial designers and engineers.

“…Conversely, industrial designers rely on mental representations (Bonnardel & Marmèche, 2005), seek originality and use their artistic skills (Hakatie & Ryynänen, 2007;Verganti, 2008) because they are asked to produce unknown objects that attract and surprise while still being understandable to novice observers (Tovey, 1998;Myerson, 2004). Indeed, industrial designers have to display generativeness (i.e., the ability to produce design proposals that differ from existing solutions and design standards; Arrighi, Le Masson & Weil, in press).Moreover, recent studies have provided evidence that design students perform better on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and are better able to control automatic processes (Edl et al, 2014).…”