For business leaders today, investing in technology is still necessary but not sufficient to respond (and anticipate) the constant changes in customer’s needs, preferences and behaviour. To transform all these changes into opportunities to grow your business, we must complete our technological advantage with a methodological one: what we, at Designit, call “Becoming a Designer Business”: mastering a set of skills, mindsets and processes that Designers apply to ensure they build the right solutions at the right speed and scale.

Designer Companies bridge the gap between “Design Thinking” and “Design Doing”.

These methodologies set Designer Business apart from the rest in 3 key aspects: “What” they bring to market, ”How” they bring it to market and ”Why” they bring to market. This brief article provides an overview on what makes Designer Businesses superior (growing revenues twice as fast per year than their competitors across industries, according to research) as well as the first steps any company can take to become one.

Change of Mantra

During the 2010s, the mantra: “Every Company must become a Tech Company’’ was ubiquitous in the realm of corporate strategy. Business technologies like ERPs (e.g. ORACLE), Collaboration Software (e.g. Microsoft Teams) and Marketing Automation platforms (e.g. Salesforce) were being activated synergically to increase workforce productivity and customer satisfaction through simplification, sophistication and personalisation; enabling businesses to simultaneously increase revenues while decreasing costs.

Therefore, during the previous decade, technological prowess could lead to a fairly sustainable competitive advantage over lagging incumbents. A study by McKinsey showed that companies transforming their data and technology capabilities from supporting tools to strategic weapons grew 3 times faster Total Shareholder Value than those who adopted a more piecemeal…