Return on Design

I'm an avid follower of Seth Godin's blog. He has a very good post on the returns on design here. In the post, he grapples with the difficulty of measuring the returns on investment in design, and comes up with a four-tiered scale as a solution.

The interesting takeaway from this article is that the difficulty of measuring returns on such "soft" investments pervade many other areas critical to firms in the new knowledge economy today. Our old "hard" indicators of firm innovation that are focused on inputs (e.g. $ invested in R&D or IT) may no longer successfully capture the entire spectrum of innovation (e.g. business model innovation) that gives firms the edge nowadays. And as the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. To progress, we will have to begin identifying ways to measure these other aspects.