Businesses and organisations often overly invest in short-term initiatives, instead of identifying the problem and developing solutions – the key to which is multi-skilled, stakeholder involvement.

One example is cycle helmets. Today, after more than 10 years of public campaigns with little impact, people are starting to don helmets. Why? A new product design approach is supplementing the public campaigns.

New design solutions make people want to wear a helmet. BELL, for example, has moved away from the typically unattractive cycle helmet to a tough and attractive piece of sports equipment. Yakkay has taken it a step further by placing the visual focus on fashion instead of safety. But their success isn’t just the result of good design, but also years of public campaigns. In other words: it’s a combined effort.

The lesson? Involving all stakeholders early on in multi-skilled, collaborative process will result in hitting target faster and more accurately. If the public health campaigners had teamed up with designers 10 years ago, we may all have been cycling more safely and stylishly for years now.

Start taking notice of your (potential) female customers, was thrust of a seminar late last year at Copenhagen Business School. The seminar focused on how businesses can increase sales significantly by focusing on female customers. According to Helle Katholm Knutsen, women decide or influence a whopping 80% of all purchases! A GIANT business opportunity.

Many of Designit’s clients are starting to recognise this opportunity and requesting our expertise on how to best target the female segment. And we’re not the only ones. Here are examples of formerly male-focused companies that are doing what they can to get their foot on the female ladder.

Take for example Sydbank, which has a pension and investment service especially tailored to women. Or Q8, the chain of petrol stations, who is launching ‘Qvik To Go’, a new product series of healthy snacks and stations with new interior that appeals more to female customers. When Procter & Gamble Co. invented Swiffer, it was a result of considering how women feel while cleaning the house.

The business potential of the female segment is huge, so grab it!

The Minister of Trade and Industry in Norway, Sylvia Brustad, recently announced design as one of her focus areas and grants the Norwegian Design Council 10 million NOK to initiate a design driven innovation program.

Even though it is not much, it is a very important sign in Norwegian politics. The politicians might finally have realized something our Nordic neighbours realized years ago. Design is about creating value and not just about styling…

Later this fall, the government will publish a white paper on innovation. In the government’s plan for innovation made in 2003 – design was hardly mentioned. And this was the same year as the Korean government launched their very own five year design strategy to increase the country’s GDP – with great success!

So here we are almost six years later with multinational companies around the world using design as a strategy in sharpening their competitive edge… Have Norwegian politicians finally gotten the point? And will they succeed in forwarding this message to business and industry? When Sylvia Brustad says she believes in design as an innovation driver – does she really mean it?

In an interview, Sylvia Brustad mentions products like the Tripp Trapp chair and Cherrox boot as good examples of design innovations in Norway. These are almost 40 year old products that represent the “old way” of thinking design. Sylvia Brustad needs new examples of design innovations! She needs examples that show the potential in design TODAY – e.g. service innovations that examplify design being used in developing immaterial values – in creating user experiences.

And as she needs new examples – Norwegian designers need the support in creating them. Use the 10 million for this! The Norwegian Design Council should initiate service design projects in our growing service sector just like the Danish government has done. This can improve our services and our design industry – they both need support in evolving….

I believe that the big potential for innovations are not in the Norwegian industry – it’s in the services!

Put that in the white paper on innovation!

Flew over Las Vegas a few months ago (landed there too) and got a shock as you do sometimes seeing a city from above. This picture shows just a tiny part of the area of the city, where two million people live. Looks like a city made by a harvesting machine – and 95% of inhabitants work in service or entertainment (not a lot of production going on there).

This city didn’t really exist 60 years ago. There’s a sci-fi feeling to it, maybe because we know that more and more people move to the cities to work in service or entertainment, as manual labour is taken over by machines.

It might well be a picture of our future seen from above…(and with global warming, maybe even the weather in northern Europe would become more like Las Vegas – one can hope:-)