BUSINESS PLANS INFORMED BY DESIGN

Today the value created by applying design at a business model and innovation level as opposed to a design and process level is marginal. Interviews with product developers from academia and industry suggest this is due to a lack of design perspective when formulating and evaluating business plans. To remedy this, we propose including Design Quality Criteria drivers in the formulation of business plans.

While auditing entrepreneurial business plans and design briefs content gaps were revealed between them. Strategy and context differences as well as a negative correlation between investors’ business plan valuation and the plans process content were found. This suggests that investors prefer plans with strategy and context descriptions to plans with high or unknown execution risk.

We also found significant differences in structure and innovation content for the following polar opposite innovation types. These were the design of products based on sustainable and on disruptive technologies. In conclusion, we recommend a procedure to align and translate business plan content into inspirational design briefs for enhancing design concept synthesis performance.