Design Values

We’ve always known that good design makes for good business. Now McKinsey & Company has crunched the numbers to prove it. the consultancy’s Benedict Sheppard, a speaker at this year’s Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore, offers four rules for upticking by design.

Can good design increase revenue, or shareholder returns? How do organisations that use design as a strategic tool fare against companies that don’t? What is design worth? In October last year, McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm, published a report titled ‘The Business Value of Design’, which went a long way to answering all of the above. A group of its researchers tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over five years – recording more than 100,000 ‘design actions’, and collecting over two million pieces of financial data. All to better understand how design correlates with business performance.

One of the report’s authors, Benedict Sheppard, refers to the work as a ‘double world first’, and describes it as a kind of breakthrough moment for McKinsey. ‘It’s the first time someone has rigorously quantified the business value of design,’ he says, ‘and the first time someone has taken individual design actions and tied those back to audited financial performance.’