Affected

Final thoughts

Behind most business successes is a story about change — change in the market, change in the economy, or change in a particular product or service. To become a market leader, a company needs to act quickly on change, gain deeper insights into their entire operations, and learn about their customers. However, even though the pace of change continues to accelerate, emotional design innovation, a powerful tool to navigate change, is not well understood and is poorly practised. However, as firms build awareness of different innovation strategies, tools and processes, their ability to adopt and embed these within their organisations requires change at all levels of the business. This change demands not only strong leadership, but also a change in company culture and thinking. Long-term thinking and continual measurement of its impacts, both quantitative and qualitative, will help to ensure that organisational efforts will be sustained for the long term. It takes a systematic approach to achieve organisation-wide change. Nevertheless, leaders tend not to account adequately for systematic change, and they are surprised and unprepared when they should not be.

In the digital age, a greater emotional understanding of the world is required. Emotions govern behaviours, and designing for affect has been proven to strengthen customer relationships. We must learn to stop searching for the one correct, quantifiable answer. We must be less impressed by those Hedgehogs who say ...