Design and Mission-Driven Companies, Emerging Perspective

Digital technologies have driven many transformations for the last 20 years, with scaling effects never experience before. On the company side, as digital technologies progressively penetrated every part of an organization, it has had many positive effects including helping collaborations and reducing competences silos. And as a consequence, progressively, the transformation have let user-centered innovation and design come as an effective practice to help people collaborate to discover, define, develop and deliver desirable, feasible and viable products and services.

Design is also now being used to help designing with data as a new material, from collecting, clustering and translating through affordances, user experiences. More recently, design engaged at the meta-design level to define the governance of smart diachronic systems, where ethics is at play. But digital technologies also helped a broad audience gain awareness of the convergence of 3 exponential transformations, being the climate change, automation (AI), and social inequality. And as a consequence, the role of companies is being revisited and in particular its' 'raison d'être'.

Companies with mission are blooming. But what does really qualify a mission company? What does it take to build and grow one? What tools design can bring to help frame a mission, a governance, and a product portfolio? To what extend the mission sets new frontiers for a company toward virtuous ecosystems? I'll try to share experiences, insights and draft toolkits for designing mission companies to stimulate the community to reflect and engage in leading a very needed transformation of how we build and grow such mission companies.