After reading “How Samsung Became a Design Powerhouse” and “Design Thinking Comes of Age”, respond to the following prompts. 

What do you think about the choice to build/hire design talent in house at a business, organization, or government agency as opposed to hiring outside design consultants? What do you see as the pros and cons of each approach? Draw on your own work experience (or coursework, if necessary) in your answer. 

Would you rather be an outside innovation consultant brought in, or work in an innovation unit internally?

For full credit: Use specific evidence, quotes, or examples from the readings to support your answers. Use specific stories and life experiences of your own to make your response unique to you. Make sure you’ve answered the “why” question for any position or opinion that you’ve expressed.

ARTWORK The Office for Creative Research
(Genevieve Hoffman), Punch Card Music BoxSPOTLIGHT

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN THINKING

by Youngjin Yoo and Kyungmook Kim

How Samsung
Became
a Design
Powerhouse

September 2015 Harvard Business Review 73

HBR.ORG

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics manufactured
inexpensive, imitative electronics for other compa-
nies. Its leaders valued speed, scale, and reliability
above all. Its marketers set prices and introduced
features according to what original-equipment
manufacturers wanted. Its engineers built products
to meet prescribed price and performance require-
ments. At the end of the process designers would

“skin” the product—make it look nice. The few de-
signers working for the company were dispersed in
engineering and new-product units, and individual
designers followed the methods they preferred. In a
company that emphasized efficiency and engineer-
ing rigor, the designers had little status or influence.

Then, in 1996, Lee Kun-Hee, the chairman of
Samsung Group, grew frustrated by the company’s
lack of innovation and concluded that in order to
become a top brand, Samsung needed expertise
in design, which he believed would become “the
ultimate battleground for global competition in the
21st century.” He set out to create a design-focused
culture that would support world-class innovation.

By any measure, his goal was achieved. Samsung
now has more than 1,600 designers. Its innova-
tion process begins with research conducted by
multidisciplinary teams of designers, engineers,
marketers, ethnographers, musicians, and writers
who search for users’ unmet needs and identify
cultural, technological, and economic trends. The
company has built an impressive record on design,
garnering more awards than any other company in

recent years. The bold designs of its televisions of-
ten defy conventional style. With its Galaxy Note se-
ries, Samsung introduced a new category of smart-
phone—the phablet—which has been widely copied
by competitors. Design is now so much a part of its
corporate DNA that top leaders rely on designers to
help visualize the future of the entire company.

It has been a bumpy journey. Despite strong sup-
port from top management, the company’s designers
continue to face constant challenges stemming from
its efficiency-focused management practices, which
are deep-rooted. Shifting to an innovation-focused
culture without losing an engineering edge is not a
simple matter. It involves managing a number of very
real tensions. Engineers and designers sometimes
don’t see eye-to-eye. Suppliers must be brought on
board. Managers invested in the status quo must be
persuaded to buy in to idealized visions of the future.
A risk-averse culture must learn to accommodate
experimentation and occasional failure.

Samsung’s success in making this shift can be
traced back to a single early decision—to build de-
sign competency in-house rather than import it. As
we’ll describe, Samsung chose to create a commit-
ted, resourceful corps of designers who figured out
that they could manage the tensions and overcome
internal resistance by deploying the same tools that
they use in pursuing innovation—empathy, visual-
ization, and experimentation in the marketplace. The
corps has helped institute policies and structures that
embed design thinking in all corporate functions and
provide a framework for reevaluating products in the
face of dramatic technological change.

Building an In-House Competency
One of the world’s biggest technology companies
and the leading subsidiary of Samsung Group,
Samsung Electronics has been much in the news
ever since it branched into consumer electronics
and decided to go head-to-head with Apple (whose
patent- infringement lawsuits against the company
are ongoing). Competition from Apple and others
has been intense; in the third quarter of 2014 the
company’s profits dropped 60% from the same
quarter of the previous year. By the first quarter of
2015 profits were recovering but were still below
prior-year levels. Nevertheless, the big picture is
one of impressive innovation and marketplace suc-
cess. Samsung’s mobile division is the sole survivor
of the radical market revolution led by the iPhone

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN THINKIN

G

BORDEAUX TV
Ethnographic research in
2003 revealed that TVs are
off far more than they’re on
in most homes, so Samsung
improved the visual appeal
of its TVs starting with this
model. It was a huge hit.

A DESIGN REVIEW MEETING
at Samsung’s Corporate Design Center

CO
UR

TE
SY

O
F

SA
M

SU
N

G

Until 20 years ago,

74  Harvard Business Review September 2015

(the mobile divisions of former competitors such
as Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson no longer exist),
and smartphone sales drove record earnings for the
company in 2013. Moreover, Samsung has been the
leader in the global TV market since 2006, generat-
ing a series of hit models such as Bordeaux, Touch of
Color, One Design, and Curved Smart.

These design leaps all began with Lee’s 1996 re-
solve—triggered in part by a consultant’s report on
Samsung’s innovation deficiencies—to instigate a
design “revolution” in the company. (This wasn’t
the first major leap for Samsung. In 1993 Lee had
launched an initiative to integrate Western practices
on strategy, HR, merit pay, and design into the con-
glomerate, but he had been unsatisfied with subse-
quent progress.) To fuel its design revolution, the
company could have sought first-rate expertise from
outside. That certainly would have been the fastest
approach, and a number of senior managers pushed
to have an internationally known Korean designer
take over the design function. But other executives
persuaded Lee to nurture internal designers who
would focus on the company’s long-term interests
rather than just their own projects.

As part of its investment in developing an orga-
nization-wide design capability, Samsung brought
in faculty members from a well-known art college
and created three training programs. One program
trained in-house designers, taking them away from
their jobs for as long as two years. (The other two
were a college and graduate-level school and an
internship program.) Lee made the programs a per-
sonal priority, which prevented them from being de-
railed by the objections of business and design execu-
tives who were furious about losing their designers
for so long.

Numerous Samsung executives now agree that
dependence on outside expertise would have done

long-term damage. Developing in-house expertise,
while laborious, created a group of designers who
take a holistic view. An Yong-Il, the vice president
of design strategy, puts it this way: “When we had
our own place in the organization, we started car-
ing about the future of the company.” The designers
also developed a capacity for strategic thinking and
a tenacity that enabled them to overcome resistance
over the long term. It seems doubtful that any group
of outside designers, no matter how brilliant, would
have been able to do that—even with support from
the chairman.

Empathizing with the
Whole Organization
In large companies, the process of innovation is
long and tortuous. Even if a design team’s new-
product concept wins raves and garners executive
support, it still must survive numerous down-
stream decisions—by engineers, programmers,
user- experience experts, team leaders, managers,
and even, in some cases, suppliers. Each of those
decisions creates an opportunity for an idea to
be hijacked by other functions’ priorities and the
strong tendency to steer the process toward the
safety of incremental change rather than the risky
territory of radical innovation. Kang Yun-Je, a se-
nior vice president and the creative director of
Samsung TV, says that nondesign functions typi-
cally think they can make good profits simply by us-
ing existing technology to make existing products a
bit better and a bit faster.

Even in a company that embraces design prin-
ciples, the reality is that designers must take steps to
ensure that their ideas prevail as originally conceived.
To do this they need to consistently empathize with
decision makers from other functions throughout
the process.

Idea in Brief
THE CHALLENGE
Samsung Electronics knew that
in order to become a top brand,
it needed a design-focused
culture that would support
world-class innovation.

THE PROBLEM
Designers faced constant
challenges stemming from the
company’s efficiency-focused
management practices, which
were deep-rooted. Managers
who were invested in the status
quo had to be persuaded to
buy in to idealized visions of
the future.

THE SOLUTION
The company built a corps
of designers with a capacity
for strategic thinking and the
tenacity that enabled them
to overcome resistance by
deploying the same tools—
empathy, visualization, and
market experimentation—that
they use in pursuing innovation.

HBR.ORG

September 2015 Harvard Business Review 75

HOW SAMSUNG BECAME A DESIGN POWERHOUSE

planning is all about. Designers, by contrast, are
trained to break from the past. But if they want to
persuade decision makers to take a chance on their
radical visions of the future, they need to adopt a
managerial mindset. Visualization is a powerful tool
for bridging the two ways of thinking and getting
skeptics to support new ideas.

The development of the Galaxy Note provides
a case in point. Soon after Samsung Electronics in-
troduced its Galaxy S smartphone and Galaxy Tab
tablet, some members of its design team noticed an
unmet need in the market: In Korea and Japan many
knowledge workers had a habit of jotting down
notes and keep their schedules in wallet-size pocket
diaries, for which neither the four-inch phone nor
the nine-inch tablet provided a good substitute.
Realizing that a whole new platform was needed,
the design group developed the concept of a smart
diary that featured a pen interface and a five-and-a-
half-inch screen.

When the designers introduced the concept to
management, fierce debate about the screen size en-
sued. At the time, the marketers firmly believed that
no mobile phone should be larger than five inches.
Even after the designers produced mock-ups, man-
agers worried that users would not accept such a
large smartphone.

“Although everyone is for innovation, no one
wants to change when we start talking about de-
tails,” says Lee Min-Hyouk, of Samsung Mobile.

“People told us, ‘It won’t sell.’ ‘You cannot hold it in
your hand.’ ‘How can you put that thing next to your
face?’ ‘The only reason to buy this is to make your
face look small.’”

It was clear that the new size would require peo-
ple’s beliefs about smartphones to undergo a funda-
mental shift. The team was able to prevail by refram-
ing the conversation: It prepared a mock-up of the
product demonstrating what eventually became the
widely imitated “smart cover,” which connects with
the user-experience software to display an interac-
tive screen when the cover is closed. The mock-up
looked more like a pocket diary, and those present at
the design review realized that when it was thought
of in that way, the new phone did not look so big.
This shift in perception allowed Samsung to create
the phablet category, which led to the highly suc-
cessful Galaxy Note series. The company now uses
the smart-cover concept for the smaller Galaxy S
series as well.

Consider, for example, the attempt by Lee Min-
Hyouk, Samsung Mobile’s creative director, to

“sell” what was eventually nicknamed the “Benz
phone” after a Norwegian newspaper likened it to
the Mercedes-Benz. It was the first flip-cover mo-
bile phone to have no external antenna. Lee, then a
junior designer, knew that in order to persuade the
engineers to eliminate the antenna, he’d need a bet-
ter reason than to make a phone look good. To bring
them on board, he reached well beyond the usual
design role and took on an engineer’s mindset, com-
ing up with a new hinge design that created an in-
ternal space for a larger and more effective antenna.
He also studied different types of paints that would
enhance signal reception. “I had to imagine a new
design for engineers as well as users,” he says. The
engineers were won over, and the phone ultimately
sold 10 million units.

Design must also win the support of suppli-
ers. If parts makers are unwilling to collaborate,
no new design, no matter how compelling it may
be, can survive. For example, when Samsung was
working on its One Design flat-panel television, it
faced strong resistance from its LCD panel supplier,
which was accustomed to providing panels with
inner covers to protect the components. TV manu-
facturers would add an external cover, which typi-
cally resulted in a thick profile for the final product.
Because Samsung’s designers envisioned a thin,
metal- encased TV, the company wanted the supplier
to omit the inner covers.

But “they didn’t listen to us,” Jung Hyun-Jun, the
vice president of engineering for Samsung TV, says
of the supplier. “They were selling standardized LCD
panels as a complete set to many other TV manufac-
turers, and they did not see any reason why they
should do something different for just one model of
one client.”

So Samsung’s designers, working with its engi-
neers, invented a supply-chain model for LCD panel
systems that would radically reduce the shipping
cost, because without the covers about 10 times as
many LCD cells could be packed into the same space.
The cost saving was shared with the supplier, and
Samsung got its coverless panels.

Visualizing the Future,
Reframing the Problem
Managers are trained to draw on the past and the
present to project the future—that’s what budget

GALAXY NOTE 
Designed in 2011 to
address an unmet need
for a smartphone that
could handle note taking

76  Harvard Business Review September 2015

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN THINKING

Young-Jun, a design SVP. To build consensus, the de-
sign group urged the company to experiment with
the idea in the European market. The model was a
big hit, and the CEO and the entire TV development
team, including marketers and engineers, backed
the concept. Bolstered by the experiment’s suc-
cess, the design group chose an even more daring
design for what became the Bordeaux model, with a
glossy white border and a red chevron-shaped lower
edge. When the full line of products finally came out,
Samsung sold a million units in six months.

Samsung has also learned to use marketplace
experimentation to support forward-looking design
research. After one team’s folding-screen concept
generated a rapid share increase in the PC-monitor
market, the team found it easier to secure funding
for other long-term design initiatives. It was able
to develop and launch a series of highly successful
products in the TV market. All Samsung’s recent hit
models have their origins in such a process.

With commercial successes like these to the
designers’ credit, the value of advance design is
now widely appreciated within the company, and
Samsung has made substantial investments in
deep-future thinking. In fact, four distinct time ho-
rizons now exist simultaneously for design within
Samsung. (See the exhibit “Design for the Near and
Distant Future.”)

Creating a Sustainable—
and Flexible—Design Organization
Internal resistance has been a fact of life at Samsung
ever since the company started on the road to

Experimenting in the Marketplace
Empathy and visualization aren’t always enough to
generate the internal support necessary for radical
change. In some cases Samsung designers experi-
ment and refine their ideas in the marketplace and
use the market data to build support.

Around 2003, Samsung’s designers wanted to im-
prove the aesthetics of the company’s TVs. This grew
out of an initiative to question the very definition of
a television. Ethnographic research revealed that in
most homes, TVs are off far more hours than they’re
on. In other words, much of the time they are pieces
of furniture. As such, the designers felt, sets should
be visually stunning. They proposed removing the
speakers from their usual location, on either side
of the screen, and hiding them. This radical design
alteration would require a trade-off on audio qual-
ity, but the designers believed that a fundamental
change had occurred in consumers’ thinking about
TV sound. Because so many people were connect-
ing their sets to home-theater systems, their think-
ing went, audio quality was no longer a priority and
could safely be compromised. Accordingly, they hid
the speakers below the screen, creating downward-
facing speaker holes that would direct sound to the
unit’s graceful, chevron-shaped bottom edge, where
it would be reflected toward the viewer.

Many Samsung managers were skeptical. They
still believed the conventional wisdom about TV
design: that, in descending order, the priorities
were visual quality, audio quality, usability, and
physical shape. The CEO was concerned about the
idea of putting speakers below the screen, says Kim

DESIGN FOR THE NEAR AND DISTANT FUTURE
Separate design teams at Samsung focus on different definitions of the “future,” from near-term to
far-term, so that the flow of ideas will be sustainable indefinitely.

LINE-UP
DESIGN
12 MONTHS OUT
Designers in business units shape
the company’s offerings by

•  Developing new products
and user interfaces

•  Conducting a competitive
analysis of new and
existing products

CORPORATE DESIGN CENTERDESIGNERS IN BUSINESS UNITS

ARCHETYPE
DESIGN
18–24 MONTHS OUT
Designers in business units, with
the help of the Corporate Design
Center, create product and platform
archetypes by

• Planning for specific new products
• Designing new products and user

interfaces
•  Investigating details such as

colors and materials

NEXT-GENERATION
DESIGN
2–5 YEARS OUT
Designers in the CDC, in
collaboration with business-unit
designers, help senior executives
shape the company’s near-term
future by

•  Developing a new business
investment plan

•  Creating a next-generation
platform road map

•  Investigating new enabling
technologies

FUTURE
DESIGN
5–10 YEARS OUT
Designers in the CDC help the C-suite
visualize the company’s distant
future by

• Developing new business concepts
• Creating a technology road map
•  Investigating technology and user

megatrends

COMBINATION BUSINESS UNIT & CORPORATE DESIGNERS

HBR.ORG

September 2015 Harvard Business Review 77

HOW SAMSUNG BECAME A DESIGN POWERHOUSE

The importance of design is felt everywhere. In
the TV division, for example, engineers will tell you
that their primary job is to help designers realize their
vision. When sales of the Galaxy S series declined re-
cently, it was design that received the most scrutiny
from corporate leaders.

Nevertheless, Samsung faces enormous chal-
lenges going forward. Its approach to design is still
largely based on the development of hardware prod-
ucts, even though most of that hardware runs on
software. As digital technology changes the business
landscape—and as Samsung continues to develop
its own operating system and various service plat-
forms in transportation, health, and payments—the
company will have to radically alter its design pro-
cess. Designers are already experimenting with ag-
ile development for software-based user- interface
designs that require frequent rapid iterations and
shorter design cycles. They are trying various
forms of cross-functional coordination as they deal
with increasingly convergent products. Recently
Samsung conducted the first companywide design-
management capability review, which is being used
to inform a corporate restructuring. The company’s
design revolution is far from complete.

As the technological landscape continues to shift,
executives of all corporations that seek an advantage
through design thinking will need to constantly re-
view their design processes, cultures, decision mak-
ing, communications, and strategy. Recognizing that
Lee Min-Hyouk’s comment “Although everyone is for
innovation, no one wants to change when we start
talking about details” applies even to design groups,
companies must push the usual bounds of design
thinking and create an ever more radical vision for
the future. HBR Reprint R1509E

design excellence, 20 years ago. In the late 1990s An
Yong-Il, the design strategy VP, met strong opposi-
tion from Samsung managers when, after studying
the design organizations of companies such as IBM,
Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, and Phillips, he recom-
mended adoption of a companywide design philoso-
phy described as “Inspired by humans, creating the
future.” Executives made it very clear that meeting
short-term profit targets by selling cheap imitations
of competitors’ products was more important to
them than establishing a design philosophy. Even
designers gave An’s philosophy a lukewarm recep-
tion. He says, “About 20% agreed with what I said but
did not want to do it. About 50% said, ‘Why bother?
We just draw pretty pictures as told by others.’ It was
only about 30% of designers, mostly young, who
were interested.”

So it’s perhaps not surprising that during the
Asian financial crisis of 1997, the company cut back
on its design initiatives. Discouraged, An considered
leaving the company. His boss urged him to enter
a PhD program instead, to study management and
organizational design and to reflect on what would
ensure a strong future for design thinking at Samsung.

His studies brought An to the conclusion that
design philosophy and design principles must be
visualized through clear organizational structures
and processes and a new personnel policy. The de-
sign group should include people who understood
social science, ethnography, engineering, and man-
agement. In 2000, when Samsung emerged from the
financial crisis, An’s boss worked with the company’s
corporate strategy office to conduct a strategic review
of the design organization. The review found that
Samsung needed to establish a strategic design group,
later dubbed the Corporate Design Center, that would
plan for the company’s future and lead the way in
perpetuating its emphasis on design thinking. Today
the CDC is organized around twice-yearly strategic
design review meetings that involve all the compa-
ny’s senior executives. The most crucial element of
those meetings is visualizing Samsung’s future.

Youngjin Yoo is the Harry A. Cochran Professor in
Management Information Systems and the founding

director of the Center for Design+Innovation at Temple
University. He is also an overseas advisory fellow of the
Samsung Economic Research Institute and consults for
Samsung Electronics. Kyungmook Kim is a principal
designer at Samsung Electronics’ Corporate Design Center.

“I had to imagine a new design for
engineers as well as users.”

—a design executive who made an aesthetic change to a mobile phone

78  Harvard Business Review September 2015

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN THINKING HBR.ORG

Design
Thinking

Comes
of Age

The approach, once
used primarily in product

design, is now infusing
corporate culture.

by Jon Kolko

ARTWORK The Office for Creative Research
(Noa Younse), Band, Preliminary VisualizationSPOTLIGHT

66  Harvard Business Review September 2015

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN THINKING

HBR.ORG

There’s a shift under way
in large organizations,
one that puts design
much closer to the
center of the enterprise.

Focus on users’ experiences, especially
their emotional ones. To build empathy with
users, a design-centric organization empowers em-
ployees to observe behavior and draw conclusions
about what people want and need. Those conclu-
sions are tremendously hard to express in quanti-
tative language. Instead, organizations that “get”
design use emotional language (words that concern
desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience)
to describe products and users. Team members
discuss the emotional resonance of a value propo-
sition as much as they discuss utility and product
requirements.

A traditional value proposition is a promise of
utility: If you buy a Lexus, the automaker promises
that you will receive safe and comfortable trans-
portation in a well-designed high-performance ve-
hicle. An emotional value proposition is a promise
of feeling: If you buy a Lexus, the automaker prom-
ises that you will feel pampered, luxurious, and af-
fluent. In design-centric organizations, emotion-
ally charged language isn’t denigrated as thin, silly,
or biased. Strategic conversations in those compa-
nies frequently address how a business decision or
a market trajectory will positively influence users’
experiences and often acknowledge only implicitly
that well-designed offerings contribute to financial
success.

The focus on great experiences isn’t limited to
product designers, marketers, and strategists—it
infuses every customer-facing function. Take
finance. Typically, its only contact with users is
through invoices and payment systems, which are
designed for internal business optimization or pre-
determined “customer requirements.” But those
systems are touch points that shape a customer’s
impression of the company. In a culture focused
on customer experience, financial touch points are
designed around users’ needs rather than internal
operational efficiencies.

Create models to examine complex prob-
lems. Design thinking, first used to make physical
objects, is increasingly being applied to complex, in-
tangible issues, such as how a customer experiences
a service. Regardless of the context, design thinkers
tend to use physical models, also known as design
artifacts, to explore, define, and communicate.
Those models—primarily diagrams and sketches—
supplement and in some cases replace the spread-
sheets, specifications, and other documents that

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN THINKING

But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about apply-
ing the principles of design to the way people work.

This new approach is in large part a response to
the increasing complexity of modern technology
and modern business. That complexity takes many
forms. Sometimes software is at the center of a prod-
uct and needs to be integrated with hardware (itself
a complex task) and made intuitive and simple from
the user’s point of view (another difficult challenge).
Sometimes the problem being tackled is itself multi-
faceted: Think about how much tougher it is to re-
invent a health care delivery system than to design
a shoe. And sometimes the business environment
is so volatile that a company must experiment with
multiple paths in order to survive.

I could list a dozen other types of complexity that
businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what
they all have in common: People need help mak-
ing sense of them. Specifically, people need their
interactions with technologies and other complex
systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.

A set of principles collectively known as design
thinking—empathy with users, a discipline of proto-
typing, and tolerance for failure chief among them—
is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of
interactions and developing a responsive, flexible
organizational culture.

What Is a Design-Centric Culture?
If you were around during the late-1990s dot-com
craze, you may think of designers as 20-somethings
shooting Nerf darts across an office that looks more
like a bar. Because design has historically been
equated with aesthetics and craft, designers have
been celebrated as artistic savants. But a design-
centric culture transcends design as a role, imparting
a set of principles to all people who help bring ideas
to life. Let’s consider those principles.

68  Harvard Business Review September 2015

Matt Krise

Matt Krise

Matt Krise

Matt Krise

have come to define the traditional organizational
environment. They add a fluid dimension to the
exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear
thought when tackling nonlinear problems.

For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs’ Center for Innovation has used a design ar-
tifact called a customer journey map to understand
veterans’ emotional highs and lows in their inter-
actions with the VA. “This form of artifact helped
us better tell a story to various stakeholders,” says
Melissa Chapman, a designer who worked at the
Center for Innovation. Even more important, she
adds, it “helped us develop a strategic way to think
about changing the entire organization and to com-
municate that emergent strategy.” The customer
journey map and other design models are tools for
understanding. They present alternative ways of
looking at a problem.

Use prototypes to explore potential solu-
tions. In design-centric organizations, you’ll typi-
cally see prototypes of new ideas, new products,
and new services scattered throughout offices and
meeting rooms. Whereas diagrams such as cus-
tomer journey maps explore the problem space,
prototypes explore the solution space. They may be
digital, physical, or diagrammatic, but in all cases
they are a way to communicate ideas. The habit of
publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an
open-minded culture, one that values exploration
and experimentation over rule following. The MIT
Media Lab formalizes this in its motto, “Demo or
die,” which recognizes that only the act of proto-
typing can transform an idea into something truly
valuable—on their own, ideas are a dime a dozen.
Design-centric companies aren’t shy about tinker-
ing with ideas in a public forum and tend to iterate
quickly on prototypes—an activity that the innova-
tion expert Michael Schrage refers to as “serious

play.” In his book of that title, he writes that in-
novation is “more social than personal.” He adds,

“Prototyping is probably the single most pragmatic
behavior the innovative firm can practice.”

Tolerate failure. A design culture is nurturing.
It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature
of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get
things right the first time. Apple is celebrated for its
successes, but a little digging uncovers the Newton
tablet, the Pippin gaming system, and the Copland
operating system—products that didn’t fare so well.
(Pippin and Copland were discontinued after only
two years.) The company leverages failure as learning,
viewing it as part of the cost of innovation.

Greg Petroff, the chief experience officer at GE
Software, explains how the iterative process works
at GE: “GE is moving away from a model of exhaus-
tive product requirements. Teams learn what to do
in the process of doing it, iterating, and pivoting.”
Employees in every aspect of the business must re-
alize that they can take social risks—putting forth
half-baked ideas, for instance—without losing face
or experiencing punitive repercussions.

Exhibit thoughtful restraint. Many products
built on an emotional value proposition are simpler
than competitors’ offerings. This restraint grows
out of deliberate decisions about what the product
should do and, just as important, what it should not
do. By removing features, a company offers custom-
ers a clear, simple experience. The thermostat Nest—
inside, a complex piece of technology—provides
fewer outward-facing functions than other thermo-
stats, thus delivering an emotional experience that
reflects the design culture of the company. As CEO
Tony Fadell said in an interview published in Inc.,

“At the end of the day you have to espouse a feeling—
in your advertisements, in your products. And that
feeling comes from your gut.”

THE CHANGE
Increasingly, corporations and
professional services firms are
working to create design-centric
cultures.

THE REASON
Many products, services,
and processes are now
technologically complex. People
are not hardwired to deal well
with high levels of complexity.
They need help.

THE IDEA
People need their interactions
with technologies and other
complex systems to be intuitive
and pleasurable. Empathy,
experimentation, design smarts,
and other qualities help create
those kinds of interactions.
Those qualities need to spread
from the product design function
to the whole organization.

Idea in Brief

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Matt Krise

Matt Krise

Matt Krise

Matt Krise

describes how the company came to realize that
it was not just in the business of making physical
products but had become one of the largest software
providers in the world. The complexity of this soft-
ware was overwhelming, so his team turned to de-
sign. “Our mandate was to create products, but also
to enable nimble innovation,” Cronin says. “That’s a
pretty tall order—we were asked to perform design at
scale and along the way create cultural change.”

IBM and GE are hardly alone. Every established
company that has moved from products to services,
from hardware to software, or from physical to digi-
tal products needs to focus anew on user experience.
Every established company that intends to globalize
its business must invent processes that can adjust to
different cultural contexts. And every established
company that chooses to compete on innovation
rather than efficiency must be able to define prob-
lems artfully and experiment its way to solutions.
(For more on the last shift, see “How Samsung
Became a Design Powerhouse,” page 72.)

The pursuit of design isn’t limited to large brand-
name corporations; the big strategy-consulting
firms are also gearing up for this new world, of-
ten by acquiring leading providers of design ser-
vices. In the past few years, Deloitte acquired
Doblin, Accenture acquired Fjord, and McKinsey
acquired Lunar. Olof Schybergson, the founder of
Fjord, views design thinking’s empathetic stance
as fundamental to business success. As he told an
interviewer, “Going direct to consumers is a big
disruptor.…There are new opportunities to gather
data and insights about consumer behavior, likes,
dislikes.…Those who have data and an appetite for
innovation will prevail.” These acquisitions suggest
that design is becoming table stakes for high-value
corporate consulting—an expected part of a portfolio
of business services.

Square’s mobile app Cash lets you do one thing:
send money to a friend. “I think I’m just an edi-
tor, and I think every CEO is an editor,” wrote Jack
Dorsey, Square’s CEO. “We have all these inputs, we
have all these places that we could go…but we need
to present one cohesive story to the world.” In or-
ganizations like Square, you’ll find product leaders
saying no much more than they say yes. Rather than
chase the market with follow-on features, they lead
the market with a constrained focus.

What Types of Companies
Are Making This Change?
As industry giants such as IBM and GE realize that
software is a fundamental part of their businesses,
they are also recognizing the extraordinary levels
of complexity they must manage. Design thinking is
an essential tool for simplifying and humanizing. It
can’t be extra; it needs to be a core competence.

“There’s no longer any real distinction between
business strategy and the design of the user expe-
rience,” said Bridget van Kralingen, the senior vice
president of IBM Global Business Services, in a state-
ment to the press. In November 2013 IBM opened
a design studio in Austin, Texas—part of the com-
pany’s $100 million investment in building a mas-
sive design organization. As Phil Gilbert, the general
manager of the effort, explained in a press release,

“Quite simply, our goal—on a scale unmatched in the
industry—is to modernize enterprise software for to-
day’s user, who demands great design everywhere,
at home and at work.” The company intends to hire
1,000 designers.

When I was at the company frog design, GE hired
us to help formalize and disseminate language,
tools, and success metrics to support its emergent
design practice. Dave Cronin, GE’s executive de-
sign director for industrial internet applications,

Design thinking is an essential tool for
simplifying and humanizing. It can’t be
extra; it needs to be a core competence.

70  Harvard Business Review September 2015

SPOTLIGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN THINKING

are set appropriately, they must be aligned around
a realistic timeline—culture changes slowly in large
organizations.

AN ORGANIZATIONAL FOCUS on design offers unique
opportunities for humanizing technology and for
developing emotionally resonant products and ser-
vices. Adopting this perspective isn’t easy. But doing
so helps create a workplace where people want to be,
one that responds quickly to changing business dy-
namics and empowers individual contributors. And
because design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a
more thoughtful, human approach to business.
HBR Reprint R1509D

What Are the Challenges?
Several years ago, I consulted for a large entertain-
ment company that had tucked design away in a
select group of “creatives.” The company was ex-
cited about introducing technology into its theme
parks and recognized that a successful visitor ex-
perience would hinge on good design. And so it be-
came apparent that the entire organization needed
to embrace design as a core competence. This shift
is never an easy one. Like many organizations with
entrenched cultures that have been successful for
many years, the company faced several hurdles.

Accepting more ambiguity. The entertain-
ment company operates globally, so it values repeat-
able, predictable operational efficiency in support of
quarterly profit reporting. Because the introduction
of technology into the parks represented a massive
capital expenditure, there was pressure for a guar-
antee of a healthy return. Design, however, doesn’t
conform easily to estimates. It’s difficult if not im-
possible to understand how much value will be de-
livered through a better experience or to calculate
the return on an investment in creativity.

Embracing risk. Transformative innovation is
inherently risky. It involves inferences and leaps of
faith; if something hasn’t been done before, there’s
no way to guarantee its outcome. The philosopher
Charles Peirce said that insights come to us “like a
flash”—in an epiphany—making them difficult to ra-
tionalize or defend. Leaders need to create a culture
that allows people to take chances and move forward
without a complete, logical understanding of a prob-
lem. Our partners at the entertainment company
were empowered to hire a design consultancy, and
the organization recognized that the undertaking
was no sure thing.

Resetting expectations. As corporate lead-
ers become aware of the power of design, many
view design thinking as a solution to all their woes.
Designers, enjoying their new level of strategic
influence, often reinforce that impression. When
I worked with the entertainment company, I was
part of that problem, primarily because my liveli-
hood depended on selling design consulting. But
design doesn’t solve all problems. It helps people
and organizations cut through complexity. It’s great
for innovation. It works extremely well for imagin-
ing the future. But it’s not the right set of tools for
optimizing, streamlining, or otherwise operating a
stable business. Additionally, even if expectations

“That’s one of my early pieces.”

M
AR

TI
N

B
UC

EL
LA

Jon Kolko is the vice president of design at Blackboard,
an education software company; the founder and

director of Austin Center for Design; and the author of
Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products
People Love (HBR Press, 2014).

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