Table Of ContentDesign Works
Revised and Expanded Edition
DESIGN WORKS
A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Value through
Business Design
Revised and Expanded Edition
Heather M.A. Fraser
© Heather M.A. Fraser 2019
Rotman-UTP Publishing
University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4875-2290-2
Printed on acid-free paper.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fraser, Heather M.A., 1957–, author
Design works : a guide to creating and sustaining value through
business design / Heather M.A. Fraser. – Revised and expanded edition.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4875-2290-2 (softcover) 1. Organizational change. 2. Business
planning. I. Title.
HD58.8.F73 2019 658.4’06 C2018-
905717-3
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Dedicated to the memory of my parents,
Elizabeth and Herbert.
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE THE PRACTICE OF BUSINESS DESIGN
1 Overview of Business Design
2 Preparing for Your Quest
3 Contextualizing Your Challenge
4 Gear 1: Empathy & Deep Human Understanding
5 Gear 2: Concept Visualization
6 Gear 3: Strategic Business Design & Activation
7 Leading Innovation & Transformation
PART TWO TOOL KIT
Preparing for Your Quest
Contextualizing Your Challenge
Gear 1: Empathy & Deep Human Understanding
Gear 2: Concept Visualization
Gear 3: Strategic Business Design & Activation
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
When I wrote the first edition of this book in 2012, enterprises around the world
were wrestling with how to awaken their capacity to innovate. A lot has
transpired since then. Increasingly, innovation is no longer seen as a stream of
activity but rather the nature of business itself. To thrive and survive, an
enterprise must be continually searching for new ways to create and sustain
value to the market and capture value to fuel the enterprise.
To help unlock enterprise potential, many enterprises have evolved their
ideology and practices. Design thinking has become all the rage, and innovation
labs and incubators have popped up everywhere. Yet, despite these well-intended
efforts to ignite innovation, some fundamentals are often missing in building an
enterprise’s capacity to continually innovate and to more seamlessly integrate
“business” and “design”:
Embedding design thinking takes more than a few short boot camps and
playbooks that oversimplify the complexities of turning ideas into business.
New ideas must be explicitly linked to the enterprise strategy and integrated
into the running of an enterprise.
Integration of data analysis and validation is key to building a business case.
Numbers matter when it comes to making a business investment. Fact-based
reasons to believe build confidence in the innovation pathway.
Innovation is a shared quest. It calls for engagement throughout the
enterprise and of leadership at all levels.
Innovation is much more than an application of methods. It calls for the right
mindset and regulation of thinking modes.
These are the critical factors that have inspired this second edition. This book
is intended to bring Business Design into the current context and reflect work in
this discipline since the first edition and a broader view of how to create value,
based on my thirty-nine-year career and the learning of others. My precept is that
business is a very creative act, and that everyone in an organization can and
should contribute to creating and delivering new value. I continue to believe that
there is an opportunity to inject more “design” into business and more
“business” into design.
Background
My personal background includes a decade at Procter & Gamble, where I
listened to consumers, made prototypes to get executive input to product and
marketing ideas early on, and crafted bulletproof business plans. Working across
disciplines at P&G was always rewarding, because people across all functions in
that company had something insightful and clever to contribute. Wondering what
it would be like to be creative all the time, I decided to jump the fence and go
into advertising and design.
In the next fifteen years, I learned a lot about the magic of imagination and
the value of making ideas tangible. I also learned that strategy is often inspired
by a novel idea. While I initially resisted that notion because I was a strategist, I
came to appreciate the truth in that notion. As humans, we naturally begin with
insights and ideas, not strategies, though we absolutely need to have a clear
strategy to optimize our way forward.
I then met Roger Martin, the visionary dean of the Rotman School of
Business with an ambition to transform business education. He offered me the
opportunity to bring those two worlds together and contribute to an experiment
in business education, centered on the notion of Business Design. The idea
behind Business Design: to integrate the best practices of business with design-
inspired mindsets and methods to help organizations tackle their innovation
challenges. In collaboration with David Kelley (co-founder of innovation
consultancy IDEO and Stanford’s d.school) and Patrick Whitney (dean of the
Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology), we set off to design a fresh
approach to education and business innovation. Our approach would focus on
how to best meet customer needs, generate breakthrough solutions for
customers, and translate those big ideas into focused and actionable business
strategies that would greatly increase the chances of innovation success. This
was the inspiration for the 3 Gears of Business Design: Empathy and Deep
Human Understanding, Concept Visualization, and Strategic Business Design, as
you will read about in chapter 1.
In 2005, Roger brought an exciting opportunity to this group. One of the
world’s most admired companies believed that design thinking could play a key
role in unlocking innovation, defining more competitive strategies, and
ultimately delivering greater value to the market and the enterprise. That
company was my alma mater, Procter & Gamble. A.G. Lafley, P&G’s CEO at
the time, wanted to propel P&G’s level of innovation and growth into the future
by pushing the value of design beyond its current application in product and
packaging. To lead this quest, he appointed Claudia Kotchka, a P&G business
leader with a strong track record for results and a passion for design as the
company’s first vice-president of Design Innovation and Strategy. Our integrated
approach was first put to the test with the Global Hair Care Team in December
2005 and subsequently refined and rolled out to the enterprise globally to fortify
P&G’s reputation as one of the most innovative companies in the world. Part 1
of this book ends with an interview with Claudia on her tips to lead such a
massive global enterprise transformation.
Concurrent with scaling the P&G program, we launched a full-scale initiative
to advance the practice of Business Design and formed a strategy innovation lab
called DesignWorks at Rotman. Our ambition was to turn this design-inspired
approach into a methodology that could be applied in a deliberate, rigorous
manner to full-scale innovation projects. Over the next seven years, we engaged
in a combination of teaching, research, experimentation, and practice activities
aimed at advancing the discipline.
We worked with top industry executives and business teams across a variety
of sectors and companies, including P&G, Nestlé, Pfizer, Medtronic, Whirlpool,
Frito-Lay and SAP, as well as public institutions and government teams. We
applied Business Design to many sectors and countries, including extensive
work in Singapore. There our program entailed a broad-scale program for
business executives commissioned by the Singapore government agency,
SPRING, an organization dedicated to developing a productive, innovative, and
competitive small-to-medium-enterprise sector to create meaningful jobs for
Singaporeans. We developed and delivered a comprehensive “teach the teachers”
certification program to transfer Business Design knowledge and skills to the
faculty of Singapore Polytechnic. Their ambition was to play an important role
1
in Singapore’s national agenda to embed design broadly into their workforce.
They have achieved remarkable results, as told in chapter 7 of this book.
All of these activities enabled us to build out our methodologies and test the
value of Business Design with many different organizations and types of
challenges. This work culminated in the first edition of the book, which captured
the learning from those years at Rotman and the mounting evidence that
Business Design
is a learnable innovation discipline that can transform the way enterprise
