Section 5.c Introduction

Abstract

The role of design in business has gradually expanded beyond merely creating and communicating better products. Design is now being understood by its totality of value-creating activities, and the competencies that span across innovation, product development, marketing and strategic decision-making. Design has moved from historical product and branding functions to formative ideation and coordination of product and processes across all dimensions of organizational value-creation. Design practices rely on engaging with multidisciplinary stakeholder teams responsible for creating sustainable value propositions that ensure the organization’s future.
 Ensuring an organization’s future requires another emerging practice, that of strategic foresight. The dynamic complexity of business in globally networked markets and partnerships requires product and service design teams to engage fully with foresight scenarios, continual trend scanning, and futures creation. There is a growing awareness that business organizations, regardless of industry or size, are faced with unprecedented uncertainties over social analyses, globalization, and technology revolutions, as observed by the increasing interest in future studies.
 Indeed, organizations are required to transform themselves, rethink their business models, innovate, and envisage alternative futures in order to adapt their approach to business, and the way they engage with informed and often empowered internal and external stakeholders. The necessity for businesses to transform, just to survive in their business segment, has created new demands for foresight, value co-creation, envisioning, and design research for assessing value for users and markets.