Innovator's Playbook

What’s all this noise about design?

Design is the ‘in’ word — but what does it mean? And should you care?

The word ‘design’ has become a substitute for what we called ‘insight-led innovation’ when I was starting my career at Unilever. (And it was probably a substitute for an even earlier term before that!)

I cut my teeth on product innovation or new product development (NPD) in the FMCG industry. Back then design was a specialist field that mostly required a tertiary qualification and creativity of the creative arts type. Designers were graphic and brand, or product or industrial designers. While any marketing or innovation team worth its salt would involve designers early in the process of brand development and innovation, their role pretty much was to apply their creativity and design skills to bring the ideas to life in the concept phase for testing, and then to design the final solution. This was design as form, function and styling. For example, if you were developing a new beer to launch, the bottle design would be done by the industrial or product designer and the graphics for the brand, label and packaging would be designed by the graphic designer.

Here is an example of the front end of our NPD process from back then. These were the key steps post innovation strategy and prior to business case, development and launch:

1. Project Initiation
2. Customer Research
3. Insight Generation
4. Idea Generation
5. Concept Development
6. Concept Research
7. Product, Packaging and Brand Development ...