One of the Design Primers for Businesspeople. Eschewing the received wisdom that the customer is always right, Politecnico di Milano professor Verganti focuses on game-changing designs that up-end expectations and create entirely new markets... Verganti also includes a useful section on how executives can attempt to instigate their own programs of radical innovation. One of the Best Innovation and Design Books of 2009. - BusinessWeek, December 16, 2009
How should a company devise new meanings and create the designs to embody them? Mr. Verganti suggests that companies form relationships with "interpreters"individuals and organizations looking at settings similar to the one in which the company's products would be used. For Mr.
Verganti, it might be said, if life imitates art, corporate life should imitate the making of art. - The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2009
If you follow Mr. Verganti's advice, it may take a while, but your competition will be left wondering how it was you managed to redefine (and capture) their business". - San Francisco Book Review, September 2009
Verganti ... tells how design innovators add unsolicited meaning" that consumers don't even know they're craving and they create products people can't live without. - BiZed, November-December 2009
One of the best books of the year is undoubtedly Design-Driven Innovation". In it Verganti attacks one of the central mysteries of innovationhow can a company successfully create a product that is a radical break from the past, and which shows the way to a new future? - John Caddell on The Customer Collective, August 12th 2009
Consumption-driven wealth and status are being replaced by identity, belonging, and a strong desire to contribute and do something meaningful" rather than just acquire things. Roberto Verganti, in his new book, Design-Driven Innovation, argues that there is a Third Way of Innovation," driven by meaning, or to be more precise, by those cultural interpreters" who have the ability to make sense of things" and give existing things new meaning and thus create new markets. - Design Mind, September 2009
