Design to Business Integration
Businesses that integrate the key elements of design perform better than businesses who don’t. Cobalt can help businesses integrate design thinking into their core skillset, building a culture of innovation through clear tools and steps.
What Is It? Aligning corporate strategy, brand and product through design
Design-to-Business (D2B) integration is the way we describe using design as a strategic element within a business. Multiple independent studiesA have shown that businesses who integrate design and user-centred thinking; are more profitable; release more new products in less time; and command customer loyalty as well as premium pricing. By making design a C-suite level function, your business will be in the best position to succeed.
What Cobalt can do We help organisations integrate design across their operations
Through our experience, including in different government-sponsored D2B integration programs, Cobalt takes a holistic view of an organisation’s process, products and branding. Through a collaborative auditing process we review existing processes and capabilities before guiding the business to determine its own goals and design-led strategy. These engagements can be standalone or incorporated within the preliminary stages of a new product development project.
Design is everything, because without it we have no business. Anybody can design a decent product. They can’t all design outstanding products. So, design is the differentiatorB.
Pentland Brands CEO (owners of Speedo, Berghaus, Canterbury)
Impact beyond current paradigms
There are many ways to define design. One useful definition can be incredibly powerful to businesses; “imagining existing technologies used in new ways to solve unmet user needs”.
Let’s take a hypothetical example; a company producing carparking technology systems. Their competitor has introduced a new barrier which outperforms theirs. Instead of reacting with a brief to upgrade their barrier to match or exceed their competitors, they stop and take a ‘design thinking’ approach. They engage designers to observe motorists’ and distil available technologies. The designers develop three solutions; the first is an improvement of the current barrier (another mousetrap); the second uses a different technology to leapfrog their competitor (a better mousetrap) and the third is a completely different approach, a new technology which provides a completely new capability while removing the need for any barrier at all (a gamechanging, mouse elimination solution). Imagining existing technologies used in new ways to solve unmet user needs.