There’s a lot of things I like about Business Week, but one thing that really stands out is its unfailing promotion of the importance of industrial design and related creative disciplines to business. Every year, it sponsors (with the Industrial Designers Society of America) the Industrial Design Excellence Awards.

Now they are ratcheting things up another notch, as outlined in the August 1st issue, on using creativity as the centerpiece of a systematic strategy to build innovative companies. It seems the impetus for this new step is a firm conviction on the part of the BW editorial staff that the creative disciplines are key to American industry’s competitiveness in the global market. According to Editor-In-Chief Stephen J. Adler: “we’re saying … that innovation and design point the way out of a lot of the difficulties U.S. companies face as high-paying jobs in tech and manufacturing shift overseas.”

Beyond just an interesting issue on creativity, BW has added a new Innovation & Design Channel on its website. With this step, BW’s editorial staff continues to show unusual foresight (more on this later).

I hope they will continue to lead the way in breaking down the walls between corporate America and the vast body of research that is being done elsewhere, whether in academia, government, or a multitude of private efforts. As I noted in my last post, there are a lot of good ideas out there.

Having done R&D myself for the past 18 years, I know BW is just scratching the surface with the research covered in the August 1st issue. Progress has been rapid in many fields, especially in understanding the differences in how people think and work. Moving forward, I suspect one of the key issues in design and marketing will be determining when to focus like a laser on a particular kind of customer, and when to tailor a design to interface with users in multiple ways that appeal to a broader range of customers.

What we really need at this point is a more rigorous theory of design, which will not only help shore up industrial design’s public image but also make it possible to reliably sort out such issues. In the meantime, BW is to be commended for not letting the issue rest. American industry has a long history of discovering industrial design, turning around its decline, and then redeveloping amnesia about the whole field. With today’s global market, as the BW editors observe, this is no time to let this happen again.