Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Design as an Organizational Competency

An organizational competency is a company's integral talent, something that it does well and gives it a competitive edge. An organization might have a competency in running an efficient supply chain (Wal-Mart), creating technological innovations (Bose), or maintaining and strengthening a brand (Disney). Organizations typically have multiple competencies, and strong organizations evolve and coordinate their competencies to synch with customer needs.

For design to become corporate competency, it has to be more than just a department of people with the cool shoes, more than the activity you perform just prior to commercialization. Design is a way of approaching problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning that can yield better outcomes. It's an open approach, and anyone in the organization can participate to generate solutions, make insightful and meaningful decisions, and build empathetic offers that address needs that customers may not even know they have. As markets, lives, and the world become more complex, developing design as a core competency will be a key business practice for small and large companies alike.

Organizational competencies in optimization and efficiency, such as Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Supply Chain Management, and Business Process Reengineering, have been applied to a point of diminishing returns. In most industries, efficiency has simply become a required capability instead of a competency that differentiates ...