I am running a one-off elective, called Design Innovation: Venture Creation as part of the Design Futures programme at The Royal College of Art over the next nine weeks. I wanted to set out a particular angle on this elective, to push further into the sort of ventures we need more of in future. This is the course note I have added as context for the students…
Words are important.
They are the basic building blocks of both the creation and communication of understanding.
We might not think exactly the same thoughts, but our hope would be that a few words can bring us close enough together to talk with common purpose.
To that end, at the start of this elective I felt it was worth sharing what I think of when contemplating the course title Design Innovation: Venture Creation.
Let’s take each word in turn (though not in order).
Venture
Venture is the V in VC, of course. I would think that ‘Venture Capital’ is a more commonly recognised term in 2025 than it was even a decade ago, for better or for worse.
As a word, venture conveys risk. There are no guarantees of a good outcome. And conventionally, the risk we are referring to is an economic one. If you invest in this idea, there is no guarantee you will see that money again. Which means that, typically, a VC’s strategy will be to invest in many ideas, and hope that one or two in every hundred (or thousand) will pay off in extraordinary ways.
Yet judging the success of ventures in purely economic terms got us to where we are today. We are all living with the consequences of what happens when you take that approach to business, weld it on to leaps in technology, and largely give the winners a free hand in how they govern themselves.
But this is an elective for Design Futures students. You are not here to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Therefore, in this unit, we will be considering ventures (and therefore risk) from the three perspectives of Regenerative Practice; the Economic, the Social, and the Environmental.
We will examine the existing venture tools and frameworks not to simply regurgitate their typical outcomes, but to critically examine their shortcomings, and find inspiration for where we can and must do better.
Innovation
I have a personal history with the words ‘innovation’ and ‘futures’. Nearly twenty years ago, I was asked to be ‘Head of Futures’ at the company I worked at. I declined on the grounds that I didn’t see much benefit in being the person telling a room of people that “in a decade’s time, we might be watching TV on a contact lens” (Side note; it wasn’t true then, and it’s probably not true now).
Innovation, on the other hand, felt much more practical and applicable to me given the typical issues our clients faced.
Innovation is about application. ‘How might we use this for that?’.
And so, I became their Head of Innovation instead.
Innovation can be, and often should be, a fairly mundane endeavour on the surface. But it is one that enables some transformative outcomes for stakeholders in a timescale that is believable for them. It is not reliant on the wave of some magic wand, the sprinkling of technological fairy dust, or the Deus Ex Machina of ‘…and then we will use AI”.
Innovation is the diligence to do the work that results in the outcome. It means identifying the risks inherent in an new venture, being able to hold the large and small implications of changes in mind, whilst also being able to explain it to others.
At some point in your careers, a few of you may do this as part of a start-up. More often, you will do this inside an established business. But in the future, more of us will be needed to innovate across different organisations, in order to address challenges bigger than any one entity can hope to solve.
We will learn in this unit where and how to apply ourselves appropriately in an innovation context.
Design
Are you are designer?
I know I am not the only one who pauses when asked this. In part, I think it is because such a seemingly simple question increasingly invites a complex answer (although I am also open to the idea that this is a ‘me problem’, rather than a universal one…)
Perhaps, though, it is better to ask what kind of designer are you?
This shifts the emphasis away from abstract concepts towards concrete examples. If you can describe the last three or four projects you’ve worked on to someone else, they will get a decent grasp of your work.
I will often slightly side-step the question by using the Smithery tagline Making Things People Want > Making People Want Things.
Rather than simply repeating what has worked in the past, new advances mean that organisations of all kinds can centre their products and services around the needs of people. Design is implied, rather than specific.
For about ten years, I have been thinking of Smithery in more specific terms as a Strategic Design Practice, which I would typically describe as being “concerned with all of the factors around a thing, and not just the thing itself. It bridges disciplines and departments, roles and responsibilities”.
More recently, I have been drawn back to Bruno Latour’s concepts of design from a talk he gave called A Cautious Prometheus? back in 2008.
‘Things’, as Latour puts it, are “complex assemblies of contradictory issues”.
When we use the word ‘thing’, we are not being imprecise, but rather we are being precise about how complex it is.
All this means that the kinds of design required to tackle ‘things’ changes according to context. It is never grandiose or all-knowing. This is not the work of ‘rock-stars’. It is simple and humble enough to reveal the world as it is and ask questions about how it might be different and what that might look like.
If you can show the thing, then you can change the thing. We will explore ways in which we can put this ethos in the centre of venture creation work.
Creation
By the end of this course, you will have created something together in groups, and you will be asked to reflect on your part in that process along the way. Despite the fact that you are all on the same course, you will know by now that you all have different skills, attitudes and passions.
These have emerged from the different experiences and cultures that brought you here, as well as the work you have done so far. These differences will serve you well when it comes to the creation of your projects.
A variety of perspectives when tackling complex issues will undoubtedly uncover new ways to approach a problem. It is up to you to make space for these perspectives in your work, to set aside preconceptions of ‘what is’ and allow moments to consider ‘what might be…’
We will learn techniques for doing this throughout the course; frameworks to use, different roles to adopt, priorities to focus on. Already though, you have ways of working you can share with others, just as they will have to share with you. As we explore the topic together, we will find more to add to our inventory too.
By the end of the unit, we will not have identified ‘the single best way to create a venture’. That doesn’t exist.
What we will all have (and I include myself in this) is an expanded set of tools, perspectives and ideas that we can use in any future in which we find ourselves, for whatever possible venture lies in front of us.