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 better understand their needs; an approach usually referred to as “user centered design”. Yet, analysis of design-intensive manufacturers such as Alessi, Artemide and other leading Italian firms, show that their innovation process hardly starts from a close observation of user needs and requirements. Rather, they follow a different strategy that we call “design driven innovation”. 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 technology. 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, that plays such a crucial role in the innovation strategy of design intensive firms, has still remained largely unexplored. This article aims at providing a possible direction to fill this empty spot in innovation management literature. In particular, first it proposes a meta-model for investigation of design driven innovation. In this meta-model a manufacturer’s ability to understand, anticipate and influence emergence of new product meanings is built by leveraging on external interpreters (designers, firms in other industries, suppliers, schools, artists, the media, etc...) who share its same problem: to understand the evolution of socio-cultural models, and propose new visions and meanings. Managing design driven innovation therefore implies to manage the interaction with these interpreters, in order to access, share and internalize knowledge on product languages and influence shifts in socio-cultural models.