In his new book, Change by Design (Harper Business, 2009), Tim Brown, the CEO of design shop IDEO, describes Steelcase’s Jim Hackett and Procter & Gamble’s A.G. Laffey as “enlightened business leaders who understand that a steady flow of innovative products rests upon an underlying culture of innovation. While they are excited about the challenge of designing new products, they are even more excited by the challenge of designing the organization itself.”

Design and innovation used to focus almost solely on products and services, and it used to be practiced almost solely by product development types. The Baldrige Criteria provide the broader definition of innovation that world-class organizations seek: “The term innovation refers to making meaningful change to improve products, processes, or organizational effectiveness and to create new value for stakeholders. Although innovation is often associated with technological innovation, it is applicable to all key organizational processes that would benefit from change, whether through breakthrough improvement or a change in approach or outputs.”

Brown describes how his company worked with Kaiser Permanente to improve the quality of the healthcare experience for both patients and medical practitioners. Rather than hiring a bunch of designers, Kaiser and IDEO spent several months teaching existing staff the principals of design thinking. Targeting nursing staff shift changes, a core team more than halved the time between a nurse arriving on shift and first interacting with a patient. The core team now acts as consultants to support innovation in the rest of the organization.

As Brown concludes: “Tricks from the designer’s toolkit—user observations, brainstorming, prototyping, storytelling, and scenario building—are invaluable in building an innovation capability, but taken by themselves they are rarely sufficient. Over time, and after countless experiences with organizations throughout the world, we have learned that innovation has to be coded into the DNA of a company if there is to be a large-scale, long-term impact.”

Improving your answers to key Baldrige questions about innovation can help you code innovation into the DNA of your organization.

The excerpt from Change by Design appeared in the October 5, 2009, issue of BusinessWeek. You can read it here.

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