ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical overview of current theory and practice in design and innovation in area relevant to marketing research.
It offers contemporary definitions of innovation and design and outlines three major challenges now facing the latter.
It clarifies how information can best be shared between marketing researchers and designers.
Focusing on the flows of information between marketing research and design, the chapter assesses the role of each in different phases of the process of new product and service development, as well as the changing role of marketing research during the maturation of an organisation’s use of design.
After looking at the credibility problems that now accompany marketing researchers’ deployment of surveillance technologies and designers’ fondness for their own version of ethnography, the chapter concludes by reviewing the role of the two professions in business-to-business IT and in public services.
