Marty Neumeir (2009) in The Designful Company lists the top ten wicked problems presently faced by companies in 2008, based on a survey conducted by his company Neutron and Stanford University.
- Balancing long-term goals with short-term demands
- Predicting the returns on innovative concepts
- Innovating at the increasing speed of change
- Winning the war for world-class talent
- Combining profitability with social responsibility
- Protecting margins in a commoditizing industry
- Multiplying success by collaborating across silos
- Finding unclaimed yet profitable market space
- Addressing the challenge of eco-sustainability
- Aligning strategy with customer experience (p. 2).
What makes this list interesting is that it points to a shift of concern from merely doing things better to doing better things. Put differently, innovation is increasingly what differentiates organizations of every sort in the various marketplaces of life. And in Neumeir’s (2009) words, “if you want to innovate, you gotta design” (p. 6). That is to say, design, and presumably a better understanding of design, is arguably the best way towards a successful resolution of these, and the other, wicked problems of our times.