Design for Breakthrough Innovation in Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

The opportunities for leveraging design are tremendous when developing breakthrough innovative offerings in new entrepreneurial ventures. Unsaddled with entrenched cultures, organizational architecture, procedures and legacy requirements, design has a “blank slate” to approach opportunities strategically and not just as an exercise in product differentiation. Studies at Stanford show that, for established firms, the strategic use of design offers an added value of 6.5% to thirty percent. >>>

Creating Breakthrough Innovations Through Design With Big and Small Data Analysis

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

For decades, Business Intelligence (BI) and, more recently, Big Data Analytics (BDA) has been successfully applied to create incremental innovations. These incremental innovations have been applied in such diverse areas as customer satisfaction, human resources, process management and merger & acquisitions. However, to date, the use of data has failed to provide new insights for breakthrough innovation. >>>

Tailoring Design Methods to Incremental and Breakthrough Innovations

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

It is increasingly hard to find something genuinely novel that one actually needs or even wants. Most new products are just slight facelifts of last year’s version that we can all easily live without. >>>

Design Philosophy is Critical in Driving Breakthrough Innovation

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

It is now abundantly clear that incremental innovation only keep the Sharks away long enough to come up for air and that it takes breakthrough innovation to swim out into the Blue Ocean, where opportunities are plentiful. Changing market and technology positions usually requires a renewal of the organization and that is when a strong design philosophy becomes integral to success. >>>

Design Philosophy — Rules of Thumb

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

More than any other car designer, Chris Bangle understands how to create breakthrough innovation. Often controversial, he has been the ‘lead dog on the sled team,’ exposed to the cold arctic wind of public opinion. At the end of the day, the most sincere form of flattery has been the competitor’s that have copied BMW Group’s design. >>>

How to Use Decision-Patterns in Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

The holy grail of building unicorn startups is to look in the right places and to reject the first thousand bad business ideas. The looking part is easy since one needs only to search areas of high market and high technology risk. However, what is the best path to making good business decisions throughout the process? >>>

INDEX: Award — Show Me the Money

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Announcement of the INDEX: Award is much more than a loud rally for promoting high-impact and beautifully formed design solutions. The Index Award is backed by the largest monetary design award and guides the most promising finalists from design solution to business opportunity, with $460,000.00 currently distributed among five winners, PEEK Retina, Duolingo, Tesla Home Battery, Ocean Cleanup Array and Sky Green.

Startups valued at over one billion dollars are called ‘unicorns’ and chasing them is a futile pursuit, which raises the question, – might one’s odds of gaining membership into this exclusive club be increased by being a Design Driven Startup? >>>

INDEX: Funding High Impact New Ventures

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

High-impact Design Driven Startups are investors’ darlings and the INDEX: Award is taking advantage of this by applying their unique design award evaluation process to vetting candidates for venture capital funding. The organization’s newly launched Danish Ventures – Investing in Design to Improve Life foundation is the next step in securing that high-impact, contextual and superior fashioned offerings are actualized. >>>