What is Strategic design

Companies are moving from an industrial strategic paradigm into a new paradigm where value co-creation has become a key issue. There are different levels of value co-creation but until now co-creation has often been operating on the outer edges of a company’s value chain. We are, however, moving towards a veritable revolution where value creation will be the core activity of the organisation and customers will act as co-producers, co-creating values (Normann, 2001). This chapter outlines different approaches and developments related to co-creation, but emphasizes the capacity of a design approach. The chapter also defines the challenges of co-creation and reports experiences from ongoing research in a bank. In this example the designer is the facilitator of this organisational process – arranging conversations and debates about the values of the community (Buchanan, 2006). Co-creation is also seen as a kind of rhetorical design communication about values, and rhetorical analysis of values (Perelman, 1969), and motives (Burke, 1969) are applied. The chapter outlines experiences, possibilities and challenges from an ongoing co-creation process in a bank: design of artifacts for co-creation, the creative session with people (inside and outside the company), and analysis and transformation of the responses into a creative and useful tool for the bank. Finally future challenges and possibilities are discussed.