Masters of Collaboration

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Rather than depending on the unique vision of a star designer or two, these companies assemble teams of specialists who perform face-to-face studies of consumer behavior and they work closely with their clients throughout the creative process. The aim is to come up with products and experiences that fit clients' customers, rather than express the individual tastes of designers.

For Continuum, the strategy has produced profitable, double-digit revenue growth in each of the past four years.

The process-driven, collaborative approach does have its detractors. "The danger is that it becomes very flat and very unemotional," says Yves Béhar, founder of Fuseproject in San Francisco. "You need personalities and points of view, and points of view come from people, not processes," Sapper adds: "You do not need big teams to create innovation; as a matter of fact, big teams often act as brakes to innovation."

Exploding the Genius Myth

But Continuum flatly rejects the idea that its work lacks impact or is in any way diluted by the collaborative approach. "Our designers do incorporate points of view, but they are points of view we develop from consumer insights that eventually drive the creation of the product or solution," says Dan Buchner, Continuum's vice-president for innovation and design.

"The tastemaker idea is out of date," says Jeremy Myerson, director of Innovation RCA, a new-business incubator within London's Royal College of Art. For Myerson, as technology and culture have evolved, "hero designers" have become somewhat anachronistic. "Perhaps there's a place for taste-making within the consumer market," he says. "But the approach is out of date when it comes to more complex stuff, where it's not just about creating beautiful things…Take sustainability. You can't have an iconic object approach to the problems of sustainability. It's a systematic thing."

In the end, the question of Hero vs. Team Effort might just boil down to a matter of semantics. After all, Béhar has a whole host of collaborators both within and outside of Fuseproject, and even Sapper, who still works as a consultant to IBM (IBM), acknowledges the need for supporting players in design. "You do need big teams to translate innovative ideas and solutions into mass-produced-products," he says, pointing to his first laptop design, the IBM Convertible, which he envisioned but which was realized by a team of hundreds. It's just that in Sapper's narrative, ultimate responsibility for the product's success lay with one person, himself.

There isn't a single person at Design Continuum who would claim personal credit for a Sapper-like classic. Does it matter? In the end, is all this process-oriented work satisfying for its designers? Some of them say yes. "What you lose is overt self expression, but I gain something much richer by doing it this way," says Alexandre Hennen, a senior designer. "I get into somebody else's life and make it better."

Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York. Helen Walters is the editor for BusinessWeek.com's Innovation and Design Channel .