Design Works: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Value Through Business Design

Design Works is a second-edition collection of best practices that serves as a leader’s guide to driving innovation within the enterprise through the strategic and design-inspired practice of Business Design. It is well recognized that enterprise success requires ongoing innovation to create new value and sustain success. That requires a disciplined integration of exploration, sound strategic decision-making and leadership at all levels of the enterprise. While the resurgence of design thinking has proven to catalyze fresh thinking, it can fall short if not fully integrated with the business strategy of the enterprise, mindful stakeholder engagement and the evolution of enterprise management systems.

This book builds on the fundamental principles of the first edition of Design Works: How to Tackle Your Toughest Innovation Challenges through Business Design. It expands on how to effectively navigate progress through strategy integration, effective stakeholder engagement and blending design-inspired practices with analytics to build a compelling business case for investment in value-creating efforts.

Like the first edition, it includes valuable frameworks, inspiring stories and practical tools to drive growth and innovation in any type of organization. Clear principles for leading innovation draw from others’ experience to help make the most of enterprise talent and resources. New methodologies hone and build on the repertoire of tools in the first edition. New stories provide insights into how a variety of organizations have leveraged the principles and practices of Business Design.

Heather M.A. Fraser is an adjunct professor at Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and Co-founder of Rotman DesignWorks, University of Toronto.