How does your company define creativity? Or does creativity define your company? In this book, Jerry Hirshberg - founder and president of Nissan Design International (NDI) - distills his experience as leader of the world's hotbed of automotive innovation and reveals his strategy for designing an organization around creativity. Rather than championing the traditional treatment of creativity as a vital component in business, Hirshberg shows how creativity can become the fundamental organizing principle of business. In The Creative Priority, Hirshberg describes how NDI produced a culture that fostered innovation, enabling his team to produce such cutting-edge designs as Nissan's Altima, Pathfinder, Quest, and Maxima; Ford's Villager; and Infiniti's J30.

This outstanding contribution to market research focuses on the upfront activities and ideas for new product and service development. A central theme of this book is that there is, or should be, a constant struggle going on in every organization, business, and system between delivering feature-rich versions of products and services using extravagant engineering and delivering low-cost versions of products and services using frugal engineering. A number of powerful concepts and tools are presented in the book to facilitate new product development. For example, three templates are featured that facilitate new product and service development. The FAD (features, attributes, and design) template is used to identify the features and attributes that can be used for product and service differentiation. The Ten-Ten planning process contains two templates: an Organizational and Industry Analysis template and the Business Plan Overview template. These two templates coupled with the FAD template can be used to develop a full-blown business plan. Entrepreneurship, technology and product life cycles, product and service versioning, product line optimization, creativity, lock-in real options, business valuation, and project management topics are also covered.