Design in Business Awards
About the Design in
Business Award
The aim of the Design in Business Award is to establish design as a key driver of business performance by celebrating New Zealand companies that have strategically used design to drive innovation and business growth.
The Design in Business Award is for specific design projects or design strategies that have generated measurable results for an organisation, such as an increase in sales, revenue, profitability, brand value, market share, internal economic improvements or improvements in staff morale and productivity etc.
Please note: the Design in Business Award is not for specific products. The Design in Business Award is for New Zealand businesses who have adopted a design-led approach and have used design to improve their business.
All previous winners and highly commended entrants including Formway Furniture, Zambesi, Orca, Glidepath, Icebreaker, OBO, Furnware, Mokum and Air New Zealand have made a strategic investment in forming and maintaining design cultures and have demonstrated the value of design to their organisations.
It is this investment in and success through design that the Design in Business Award seeks to celebrate.
History of the Awards
The Design in Business Award is a Designers’ Institute of New Zealand initiative.
In 1997 the Design-led Business Award was established as part of the Designers’ Institute Best Design Awards programme, which celebrates our country’s outstanding products, graphics and spatial (interior) design outputs.
As the Design-led Business Awards grew in stature, and as the importance of design as a key driver of the economy increased, the renamed Design in Business Awards was established as a stand alone event in 2003.
This coincided with a change in business and government thinking, demonstrated by the New Zealand Trade & Enterprise (NZTE) Design Taskforce report ‘Success by Design’ which led to the establishment of the Better by Design programme.
The philosophy behind Better by Design and the Designers’ Institute of New Zealand’s Design in Business Award was that New Zealand could achieve commercial success through differences such as ‘design thinking’.
Better by Design, who have partnered with the Designers’ Institute for this year’s Design in Business Award, first joined as a supporting sponsor of the Awards in 2006.
