Our Work » Getting Design To Thrive
Corporate Design
Getting design to thrive
Challenge
The senior leadership team of a global Fortune 500 CPG company was concerned. Despite a rapidly growing function of more than 250 talented product designers on staff, the company's challenges in infrastructure, recruiting, and corporate culture were hindering its progress. The senior executives wanted to understand the company’s current progress relative to other corporate design leaders, as well as build an in-house tool to assess internal integration efforts and to guide continuous improvement. They needed insight to help them move forward. How did their progress stack up to their competitors? What tools could they use to assess their internal integration efforts and guide continuous improvement to keep them on track?
Approach
Motiv’s leadership performed an initial capability assessment involving over one hundred interviews at all staff levels across multiple BU’s. Over fifty recommendations for improvement were made in key organizational development areas such as process integration, communication, training of both business and design staff, talent management, and leadership. Exemplar research informed business unit design leaders as well as executive staff of best practices across a range of corporate design organizations. Principles gleaned from exemplar research were used to build a structured tool to guide continuous improvement that was administered in multiple business units. Finally, serving as knowledge partners to our client, Motiv built and administered training materials to assist with internal deployment of the tool so that regular assessments could permanently become part of the design function’s operating model.
Results
This leading CPG company continues to leverage findings from our organizational assessment and exemplar research to make strategic improvements in its operating model for design. Recommendations for improvements at five separate business units have been carried out by multifunctional senior leaders across their respective management structures. The company has become widely acknowledged as the leading design exemplar in the CPG category, adding significant headcount in the U.S. and abroad since 2007. To cultivate a culture of design within its normally highly analytical staff of engineers and marketers, the company created an initiative to teach and deploy design thinking methods at every function and level in the company. This activity, chronicled on Businessweek Online, has heralded a new level of credibility and popularity for the problem solving methodology among a vast array of corporations interested in fostering innovation through the use of design methods.
Case Studies
PDF version: 
Getting Design to Thrive
Design-centric companies outperform the market
Design Centric Firms:
Target, Hewlett Packard, P&G, JetBlue, Starwood, Whirlpool, J&J, Nike, McDonalds, Kraft
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