 "(Left top and below) Founders of Airbnb Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk; Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick; (right top and below) McKinsey & Company’s acquisition of LUNAR")
In the last decade, the more far-seeing set of mature, large businesses has been making hopeful approaches towards design. Their ardour comes from seeing design as a source of competitive advantage, and has been reported on widely.
In this column, too, we labelled Apple, Airbnb, Google and their increasing tribe as “digital darlings”. In their wake, we noted, traditional behemoths like P&G and GE have made design more central, and made products, development and innovation (thus design) central to their resource allocations and hierarchy. Nowadays, these grey gentlemen are far less bashful in their approaches. The elevation of design seems like
