Design, Meanings, and Radical Innovation: a meta-model and a research agenda

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 Ital- ian firms shows that their innovation process hardly starts from a close observation of user needs and requirements. Rather, they follow a different strategy called de- sign-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 technol- ogy. 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 unex- plored. 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 under- stand, anticipate, and influence emergence of new product meanings is built by re- lying 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 design- driven 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 innova- tions of meanings partially mirrors the process of creating breakthrough techno- logical innovations. Studies of design-driven innovation may therefore benefit significantly from the existing body of theories in the field of technology manage- ment. 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.