An Elusive Prize Unpacking the MDI n short, the potential for design-driven Just over 50 percent admitted that they have growth is enormous in both product and no objective way to assess or set targets for the In the remainder of this article, we’ll describe service-based sectors Exhibit 3 . The good output of their design teams. With no clear way the four clusters of design actions that showed news is that there are more opportunities than to link design to business health, senior leaders the most correlation with improved financial ever to pursue user-centric, analytically informed are often reluctant to divert scarce resources performance: design today. Customers can feed opinions back to design functions. to companies (and to each other) in real time, Measuring and driving design performance with allowing design to be measured by customers "The good news is that there the same rigor as revenues and costs. themselves—whether or not companies want are more opportunities than ever to listen. to pursue user-centric, analytically Breaking down internal walls between physical, digital, and service design. Lean start-ups have demonstrated how to make informed design today." better decisions through prototyping and Making user-centric design everyone’s iterative learning. Vast repositories of user data That is problematic because many of the key responsibility. and the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) drivers of the strong and consistent design have created powerful new sources of insights environment identified in our research call De-risking development by continually listening, and unlocked the door for new techniques, for company-level decisions and investments. testing, and iterating with end-users. such as computational design and analytics to While many designers are acutely aware of some value. Fast access to real customers is readily or all of the four MDI themes, these typically available through multiple channels, notably can’t be tackled by designers alone and often social media and smart devices. All of these take years of leadership commitment to establish. developments should place the user at the heart of business decisions in a way that design leaders Top-quartile companies in design—and have long craved. leading financial performers—excelled in all four areas. What’s more, leaders appear to have What our research demonstrates, however, an implicit understanding of the MDI themes. is that many companies have been slow to catch When senior executives were asked to name their up. Over 40 percent of the companies surveyed organizations’ single greatest design weakness, still aren’t talking to their end users during 98 percent of the responses mapped to the four development. themes of the MDI Exhibit 4a and 4b . The Business Value of Design 5