Description:
<jats:p>The past decade has ushered in a growth of interest on design, both among scholars and practitioners. The consequence has been the development of a wealth of new theories on design, innovation, and design management. After a decade of studies, we have developed significant understanding about how firms may better analyze customer needs through user‐centered design, how they can generate better ideas through brainstorming methods and multidisciplinary teams, how consumers value the form of products. Yet, as often happens in research, many studies have focused on the most visible and measurable forms of design (those connected to the clear processes and methods of user‐centered design). The consequence is that, apart from a few exceptions, the focus of theory development has been on incremental innovation enabled by design: better user interface, improvements, differentiation, nice ideas and features that get rapidly imitated and obsolete. Scholars have often neglected some of the most intriguing forms of design, i.e., when design brings a radical perspective, when it contributes to the redefinition of an industry, and the creation of a new paradigm. In this short note I hope to set the stage for this new frontier of research in design management. In particular I propose two fields of investigation: the role of design to radically innovate the meaning of products and services, and the interaction of radical design with radical technologies, which I call technology epiphanies, i.e., the identification of the most powerful meaning enabled by a breakthrough technology.</jats:p>