How the Design Processes Add Innovative Capacity in Startup Companies

Abstract

In recent years, innovation has been an important word in the business world, but in the universe of companies known as startups, innovation is a primary condition. Young entrepreneurs want their small businesses to win scale and agility in the consumer market with its creative and disruptive ideas. However, because they are different companies than traditional business, these small company need management models that understand their singularities and allow the establishment of a reality consistent with their limited resources, to continue innovative and competitive in Brazil, whose mortality rate is still high. From these reasons, this paper analyzed the four stages of the Porto Digital incubation process to explore the methodologies used by the cluster about design management, whose processes stimulate the development of innovative capacity of these youth organizations to implement an approach the strategy management of design, as a project and collaboratively as part of the identification of innovation opportunities in the current environment where startups are work in. Therefore, through a literature review using the latest lines of research that address design management, strategic design and innovation, as well as documentary research about the Porto Digital incubation process, the results show that design management area yet it is little explored, even in an environment conducive to fostering innovation and the efforts has a concentration on the stages of incubation processes aimed at product development, to the detriment to other business functions.