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Design Thinking

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Miguel Martínez
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8 views2 pages

Design Thinking

Uploaded by

Miguel Martínez
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Innovation Management: Winning in the Age of Disruption

Design thinking
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is an approach to innovation that focuses on human-centred, or user-centred design.
Humans, and specifically the users of any innovation, must be central to the design of solutions to
problems.

It prioritises:

• co-creation (thinking and crafting together)


• collaboration (communicating and working together)
• empathy (understanding each other)
• integrative thinking (pulling things together).

Design thinking can be found in almost all disciplines, being practiced in many businesses the world
over, for product, process and service innovation.

Developing a design thinking strategy


There are many elements that can be incorporated into a design thinking strategy. You can tailor it to
your business needs and evolve your own method and process. Later in this activity you will explore
how IBM developed their approach.

1.Empathy - Understand your user and their problem


Make sure you understand your user and the problems they face. You could carry out qualitative
research such as interviews and observations in their practice. Try to get an understanding of their
culture, their work and their experiences. You should work to get a deep understanding of the
problem your user experiences and define it further with them.

2.Co-creative, multidisciplinary teams


You should form a multi or trans-disciplinary team comprised of people with different skills sets and
knowledge. Always include an expert in the problem domain – for example, if your innovation is in
medical technology for invasive heart surgery, then include a heart surgeon. And don't forget to
include your users in the process throughout.
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Innovation Management: Winning in the Age of Disruption

Experience suggests that each team should be between four to five people. In any one session you
should avoid having more than three or four teams, although you will find some design thinking
sessions have far more than this.

3.Engage in multiple rapid prototyping


Innovation should not start with an idea, but with a problem. The problem can produce hundreds of
ideas but if they are not designed around the problem, then they can be useless.

Once you have defined the problem (you will redefine this as the innovation develops) and you have
your team, it is time to ideate. Engage in multiple rapid prototyping to produce solutions to what your
team believe are the best ideas, or a combination of them. This involves a process of getting
together and creating a rapid, cheap, prototype of the product (or service) using spare items, paper,
sticky notes, boxes, string and other crafting materials. You work as a team to co-create the ideas
represented in several forms (oral, visual, verbal or symbolic). You then test this solution, and ideate
again, and then prototype again, and again, and again. Rapid prototyping is cheap, makes failure
safe to do, is fun, and highly effective, so prototype rapidly, and prototype often.

4.Implementation
Plan: Once you’ve had your design thinking session you must consider logistical and financial
implications. If you had three or four teams work separately on different ideas, you may have multiple
solutions. Choosing is the most challenging stage, so it is advisable to develop a convincing business
case for each idea (product or service), and then agree on the optimal solution. Sometimes however
you may need to make a loss on innovation, so don't necessarily make ‘money’ the core or only
decision criteria. Apple’s iPod made losses for several years, but had significant impact on the
industry. You should think about the resources that need to be gathered in order to execute the idea
into reality. Tools such as stakeholder maps, PESTLE, and SWOT, can used here for building the
business case. You might also like to include people from an accounting or finance background to
inform the process.

Execute: To implement the idea, product or service you can engage traditional project management
methods. However, you may also use design thinking in this phase, for example, to develop the
prototype of the process of execution. Again, you should involve people from various parts of the
business, including experts and users.

© University of Leeds 2 of 2

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