Product details

Most analysts hold that the innovation strategy of firms consists of two domains: incremental and radical. According to these theories, radical innovation is the realm of technological breakthroughs. The meanings behind products are supposed to be part of the first domain: companies can understand them better only by scrutinizing user behavior and using the resulting insights to improve their products. In this chapter, however, noted innovation expert Roberto Verganti shows that innovation of meanings, like innovation of technologies, may also be radical. And radical innovation of meanings is rarely pulled by users but is instead proposed by firms. Thus, there is a third - and largely unexplored - domain in the innovation strategy of firms: design-driven innovation. This chapter is excerpted from ‘Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean'.