Bang & Olufsen Case Report

The Bang & Olufsen (B&O) case centers around a company that has great success selling high-end consumer electronics such as televisions, audio systems, and telephones to a small and sophisticated client base. Bang & Olufsen works hard to protect their design creativity and has a fantastic reputation for designing products that are visually stunning. Most of the design and production process is focused on keeping the product designers happy so as not to interfere with the company’s single greatest attribute, dramatic design.

The objective of B&O is not just to remain a leader in the high-end consumer electronics industry. Their real objective is to have software and features that are as shockingly impressive to consumers as their design already is. B&O has largely focused on creating products that evoke a certain emotional response from the user, with their largest concentration focusing on physical appearance. While the competition seeks to include more and more features in their products in order to gain new sales, B&O has kept its focus on the design aspects and only added features when deemed truly useful to the consumer in order to avoid the clutter of features that a user may end up never needing.

The potential problem that B&O faces is that while they have been able to maintain a steady focus on improving upon the physical design aspects of their products, they may need to shift some of that concentration toward innovation in the software design behind the product. This need is likely most apparent in products that are very software dependent such as televisions, stereos, & mobile phones. Although B&O has made a few attempts to shift the firm’s focus to include grand innovations in software technology, only modest gains have been made.

Torben Ballegaard Sorensen, CEO of B&O, saw that software innovation was an area that needed major improvement and thus began the group “Idealab” to work together with the design group “Idealand”. The purpose was...