2021 Design Leadership Trends. 3000+ Design Leaders tell us what…
By: Adam Fry-Pierce
Tags: Design Leadership, Design Thinking, Management, Design, Business Strategy

Throughout the 2010s, more and more design teams are working with Research and Development or Innovation Centers. This work mostly happened in a nice lab or an even nicer innovation center.

With everyone moving to remote, what’s the new standard? There are two winning ideas in the design leadership community.

Bake it in…or go to a building?

On one hand, some argue to evolve the innovation center of excellence, operating in a remote-first model. While innovation centers have been around for a while, very few were built for remote.

We heard enough stories in 2020 about how centers of excellence grinned to a halt, going offline for months. Many are advocating these facilities be turned into innovation clubhouses, where teams occasionally meet to collaborate, but most work is done asynchronously from home office.

Others are advocating to incorporate innovation into practices. Many are experimenting with a variety of methods to best infuse the customer voice into their product development flow in a remote environment. We hear about a lot of frameworks, but the most effective way to innovate in any environment, is to subscribe to lean mythologies and invest in maturing your research practices.

There’s isn’t likely to be a “one-size-fits-all” approach here, and it’s definitely too early to tell which route most will venture. Hopefully, it’s not a mutually exclusive option. There’s value in being customer-driven in your practices, and there’s value to seeing your peers in person.

The five cornerstones of Innovation

Look at any major brand known of innovation. They need a core set of elements to continue to be able to innovate year after year.

They probably all have 5 things in common: they have innovation systems, measurement frameworks, training programs, mature org structures, and a culture to support radical thinking. Let’s break these down.

Systems: ideas need to be able to start anywhere in the business, then flow through a set of standardized systems, so a central group can validate the ideas. Whether this is baked into the product development flow or in a center of excellence, there needs to be a known and easy-to-find system.

Org structure: Innovation isn’t restricted to a closed off R+D lab. It isn’t a small set of the design team doing really cool new work. It should be everywhere, and encouraged at every level of the company. Silo’d orgs can prohibit new thinking, and ultimately stiffle growth, as much as any other cornerstone listed here. Each org bucket should have innovation intakes engineered into the org design. Innovation systems need good org design, and vice versa.

Measures: This is controversial, and not an easy task. Once an idea is chosen for a new product line or feature, attached innovation scorecards to measure progress and help the team socialize the project’s impact. Lean Innovation Scorecards and the HEART framework are excellent references to learn from, check them out.

Culture: Everyone should feel safe enough to throw out big ideas. To do this, build a place where ideas are chosen based on evidence and merit. Ideas should have a clear rubric that objectively states what new ideas need to do for the business. Then they need to go through similar levels of scrutiny, via testing and experimenting.

Training Programs: We can have systems, measures, and culture and still have an org that indexes low towards innovation. We need training programs for every type of employee, particularly those close to product. Company onboarding programs need to address the subject head on, clearly identifying innovation intakes and pinpoint where any employee can find them. There should also be semi-regular events that bring attention to the innovation systems. Bonus points if you have an annual event like a hackathon or startup week to help encourage higher-level ideation.

Thank you

This article is derived from the 2021 Design Leadership Trends report by Adam Fry-Pierce and Diego Nunez, after speaking to many leaders in the Design Leadership Forum. If you’d like to discuss these trends with the same 3000+ design leaders who the report was partially made by, join us.