Business Thinking for Designers

Business + engineering + design = innovation 
Figure 4-2: The sacred Venn diagram of innovation
From a historical perspective, this visualization has been 
important to promote the need for design to join engineering 
and business as core innovation disciplines. This promotion 
has worked. Organizations leverage Design Thinking methods 
and hire designers to create seamless, beautiful, engaging, 
and organic customer experiences. However, the diagram 
is outdated. It oversimplifies how complicated it is to create 
products and services, and pigeonholes designers into a 
limited perspective of what innovation means. It does this 

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Create conditions for design maturity
because it fails to communicate the most basic of business 
expectations: the link to competitive advantage. 
Organizations regularly and wrongly assume that business, 
engineering, and design functions are enough to create a 
competitive advantage. But a competitive advantage is only 
obtained when the characteristics of these functions combine 
to create desirable, feasible, and viable solutions. 
By updating the diagram to reflect this, we can reframe 
the conversation about the value and fit of design in the 

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organization. This reframing is an important first step in 
establishing greater trust with our cross-functional colleagues.
Figure 4-3: An updated Venn diagram for competitive advantage by 
Ryan Rumsey
Business becomes viability. Engineering becomes feasibility. 
And design becomes desirability. Shifting to desirability means 
moving away from discussions of aesthetics and towards 
discussions of what customers actually need and want: 
desirable solutions. 
In addition to evolving organizational functions to product/
service characteristics, we should also expand the definition 

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of “innovation.” The word innovation is undeniably exciting to 
all parties, but when it’s abstract and poorly outlined, it doesn’t 
merit trade-off decisions.
Innovation is the act of introducing something new or unique. 
But your organization needs more than this. It needs adoption 
to validate competitive advantage. This is the value of good 
design, because desirable solutions are adopted solutions. 
Consider this extrapolation of the updated diagram:
• A viable solution, one that’s good for our business
• A feasible solution, one that can be executed by our team
• A desirable solution, one that will be adopted by our 
customers
Designers who speak to partners about desirability, adoption, 
and competitive advantage gain trust faster than those who 
don’t. That said, desire is complex and you need simple ways to 
describe its unique makeup. That’s what we’ll cover next. 
Pro tip
If you have a business partner who asks why you’re not “doing 
it like company X,” a great response is: “Because we’re not 

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designing for the values of company X and their customers. 
We’re creating a competitive advantage for us.”