The Collaborative Design tool engages multi-level stakeholders and their customers as equal designers in inventing new generations of business solutions. First developed in 1978, Collaborative Design (CD) creates a continuous reengineering environment that effectively fuses business methods and organizational learning into one seamless system. It is based on the following principles that, taken together, maximize commitment to and value from the process:

1. Acknowledgment: All participants are and should be acknowledged as valuable designers and testers of solutions.
   
   
2. Negative Issues Valuable: All issues and concerns, including those perceived as negative, add substantial value to the final outcome and should be acknowledged for doing so.
   
   
3. Continuous Improvement: Collaborative Design should continuously improve the business value and human dignity for the individuals, the organization, and its customers.

As a fully integrated high-performance business-learning technology, Collaborative Design engages key stakeholders in at least five essential tasks:

• Diligently examining current business practices;
  
  
• Scrutinizing the underlying structures and assumptions of existing systems, including strategic planning, IT, human resources, and organizational learning;
  
  
• Designing a new generation of solutions that address underlying, previously hidden and undiscussed barriers;
  
  
• Efficiently evaluating the economic impact of each intervention; and,
  
  
• Continuously evolve and test one complete and cohesive system.

Turning the negative, cautious, critical and skeptical input into valuable contributions to the process allows all stakeholders to invent new methods to accomplish the forward-looking design objectives and participate in the field testing of the new solutions. CD has been used to address customers' strategic business issues, generate new products and services, and create new market distinctions.