Where does business design come from?

This blog post is part of a series of posts around business design.

The discipline of business design seems to be increasingly appealing to actors within the service design and innovation consultancy industries. Spotless isn’t an exception — I am proud to announce that I have recently joined as their Service & Business Designer moving across from Fjord.

Another trend I have noticed while talking to friends in the industry and former colleagues, however, is how little business design is understood. Due to the fairly recent emergence of the practice, its definition is blurred. No need to worry though — even Business Designers themselves find it hard to define their roles and to describe their activities. As a Service & Business Designer at Spotless, I am excited to share a series of blog posts which will aspire to share my own vision of what Business Design stands for.

At the macro level, a business designer applies human-centered methodologies to innovate or optimise the business-related elements of a service or product. It is equally important for a business designer to understand human-centered design in order to apply it to business elements as it is for him or her to have the analytical skills to understand how a business or service functions.

I will go into the nitty gritty of what business design actually is, practically speaking, in the following blog posts. Today, I will focus on how the world of service design and innovation consultancy evolved with time, as it…