DESIGN INNOVATION PROCESS RESPONDS TO UNMET NEEDS CREATED BY COVID-19

This article presents a recent case study of the development and bringing to market of a new product through the design process of the author, Dan Brown, Ph.D. (Brown Sr.), a product design practitioner and academic with over 40 years of innovation experience, and his son Brown Jr., a business entrepreneur. This case explores how they collaborated as an entrepreneurial team to design and commercialize a novel PPE face shield using Brown Sr.’s Differentiation by Design research process. The article focuses on how design creates value and competitive advantage in markets by examining a recent case study of successful new product development arising from the COVID-19 pandemic -- providing adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).When seeking advantage in the practice of innovation, there is a creative quest that product design and development practitioners must address through their design process. Truly innovative and competitive new products are rare, as their design efforts often fall short of the original design aims. Brown Sr.’s past research has revealed that this creative quest often appears at the intersection of the existing knowledge boundaries of the user as well as the many less prominent stakeholders in the new product experience.Often framed as unmet stakeholder needs, this knowledge boundary appears when existing practice knowledge proves inadequate, but the development objective remains. These knowledge gap opportunities appear through detailed research of the problem, existing solution benchmarks, and stakeholders. They can also appear when the designer-researcher looks for them specifically. Finding these knowledge gaps and creatively conceiving advantaged solutions into competitively advantaged spaces or white spaces is the goal of this design process.This Case shares successful marketplace outcomes with Brown Sr.’s past research cases resulting from their design and development approaches. With a combined quantitative and qualitative research focus, this autobiographical case study builds on the insights available to the researcher. Autobiographic cases provide unique access to rich quantitative evidence of the design narrative and marketing histories gained from an insider’s view of industry practice.Competitive advantage and its role in innovation in the real-world laboratory of the marketplace provide the context for researching the process of this design-focused strategy. The process starts with reframing the fundamental problem, which was, in this case, how to rapidly produce millions of face shields in a matter of months; the Browns teamed up to create a viable and scalable shield solution for the masses.