Design and the cultures of enterprises

The paper is structured as follows: First, we briefly introduce the main currents of thought in organizational change studies, fur¬ther developing the connection between new product development and the need for change in the culture of the enterprise because of contradictions between the existing culture of the enterprise and the one needed to develop and exploit new products. Second, we examine how managerial practice is generally characterized by a type of reductionist thinking, in which methods, techniques, and tools are extracted from their original context and adopted along increasingly shorter lifecycles to manage organizational change. Such practice occurs even when the theories on organizational change are holistic and systematic. Next, we differentiate the notion of design culture from design thinking and discuss it in relation to enterprise culture. In this part, we express the idea that the products of an enterprise are not just the synthesis of the end user’s needs, but essentially are the synthesis of its culture. From this assumption, we hypothesize that the development of new products often generates or requires changes in the culture of the enterprise as a kind of “side effect” related to the novelty of the products (at least for this particular enterprise). To verify this hypothesis, we consider three cases: the Sony Playstation, the LEGO Mindstorm, and the strategic design division in 3M. The cases are discussed in the last part of the article, in which evidence in favor of design culture as an implicit agent of change is pro¬vided alongside some lessons learned from the study.