FLEX/the INNOVATIONLAB - FLEX for short - was founded in 1989 as an industrial design agency. From the start FLEX focused on design as a potential competitive advantage for its clients, creating added value to the businesses of its clients, the society and the environment with beautiful objects. Situated in Delft, FLEX works with an international team of designers and engineers on projects in the fields of consumer products, professional products, structural packaging and product service combinations. Next to that, FLEX develops unique design-research-tools in order to optimize and facilitate design processes like the co-creation tool DesignGame® that enables customers and designers to gain profound user insight in the fuzzy front end of the development process. FLEX is a full service design agency. Due to its experience, broad knowledge base and a large number of long lasting client relationships, FLEX is regarded as one of the leading Dutch design agencies and it has been awarded with the largest number of design prices in the Netherlands.
The reason to participate in the CRISP program and more specifically in project CASD (competitive advantage through strategic design) is grounded in a strong belief that creativity – as part of design – will become a more and more important tool for incremental and radical innovation for the western economy. Globalization has caused that anything a company can access from a distance is no longer a competitive advantage, because now everybody can access it. It’s not just a matter anymore of being better at what companies do, it is a matter of being really different at what they do. This is precisely where creativity and added value through design are important. FLEX hopes that the CASD project will provide insights and learnings to this topic. The CRISP program enables FLEX to get access to research to define the precise strategically added value of design and FLEX would not be able to execute this research program on its own due to its commercial restrictions and limited amount of time.
The reason to participate in the CRISP program and more specifically in project CASD (competitive advantage through strategic design) is grounded in a strong belief that creativity – as part of design – will become a more and more important tool for incremental and radical innovation for the western economy. Globalization has caused that anything a company can access from a distance is no longer a competitive advantage, because now everybody can access it. It’s not just a matter anymore of being better at what companies do, it is a matter of being really different at what they do. This is precisely where creativity and added value through design are important. FLEX hopes that the CASD project will provide insights and learnings to this topic. The CRISP program enables FLEX to get access to research to define the precise strategically added value of design and FLEX would not be able to execute this research program on its own due to its commercial restrictions and limited amount of time.