n short, the potential for design-driven growth is enormous in both product and service-based sectors Exhibit 3 . The good news is that there are more opportunities than ever to pursue user-centric, analytically informed design today. Customers can feed opinions back to companies (and to each other) in real time, allowing design to be measured by customers themselves—whether or not companies want to listen. Lean start-ups have demonstrated how to make better decisions through prototyping and iterative learning. Vast repositories of user data and the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) have created powerful new sources of insights and unlocked the door for new techniques, such as computational design and analytics to value. Fast access to real customers is readily available through multiple channels, notably social media and smart devices. All of these developments should place the user at the heart of business decisions in a way that design leaders have long craved. What our research demonstrates, however, is that many companies have been slow to catch up. Over 40 percent of the companies surveyed still aren’t talking to their end users during development. Just over 50 percent admitted that they have no objective way to assess or set targets for the output of their design teams. With no clear way to link design to business health, senior leaders are often reluctant to divert scarce resources to design functions. That is problematic because many of the key drivers of the strong and consistent design environment identified in our research call for company-level decisions and investments. While many designers are acutely aware of some or all of the four MDI themes, these typically can’t be tackled by designers alone and often take years of leadership commitment to establish. Top-quartile companies in design—and leading financial performers—excelled in all four areas. What’s more, leaders appear to have an implicit understanding of the MDI themes. When senior executives were asked to name their organizations’ single greatest design weakness, 98 percent of the responses mapped to the four themes of the MDI Exhibit 4a and 4b . "The good news is that there are more opportunities than ever to pursue user-centric, analytically informed design today." An Elusive Prize The Business Value of Design