A growing number of innovation challenges are best addressed by Design, not engineering or science, especially when the goal is big ideas and bold differentiation.  This is a reversal of roles, because Design in the past was applied as a veneer to package innovation that scientists, engineers, and tinkerers would come up with. Today, Design is the source of innovation and Designers are the inventors. Design is as much there to define the future as science and engineering, and that shift is accelerating.  Design has become the new R&D, at least the “R” part anyway. For an increasing variety of products the innovation is the Design and Design is the innovation.  That’s a big change.

If Design is no longer just a pretty package around other technical innovation, then what is it? Design is a type of innovation, just as science is.  The difference is Design exists to please humans, not to solve technical problems, so Designers must be experts in knowing or discovering things about human preference.  For this reason Design’s role in innovation characteristically begins with a deep examination of the humanity, or as we call it the anthropology. A Design process then uses any anthropological discoveries to initiate new ideas for products. The theory is that a large number of hard problems are best solved not with raw engineering but with an anthropologically driven Design process.

The irony is that Designers frequently find themselves calling for technology that does not exist in a mature state, causing them to commission new engineering research from vendors and other departments.  So, in a funny sort of way Design is the new R&D and engineering is the new packaging.