Combine technology and people for design thinking on steroids

Design thinking is more than a way to generate innovative ideas for new products and services; it is a powerful social technology capable of encouraging more productive and strategic conversations. Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving. The methodology typically involves creating numerous solutions, then prototyping and testing them until a winning solution is found.  

When coupled with digital transformation and a human dimension, design thinking holds the key to unlocking high-value opportunities for customers as well as driving strategic change within organizations. But leaders will only realize these benefits if they change their mindsets and skillsets in specific ways.  

In fact, design thinking can do for innovation what Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Lean principles have done for manufacturing, according to Jeanne Liedtka, a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. It is widely believed that these principles have streamlined supply chain management and improved customer experience. Design thinking is potentially even more important, though.  

“Design thinking can unleash creativity and help people work together more effectively to manage risk in a changing world and develop radically improved business processes specifically around producing organic growth,” Liedtka said, at a recent webinar led by IMD professors Didier Bonnet and Patrick Reinmoeller. “It’s not very often we discover a new way of working that really has the potential to create dramatic improvements in business outcomes.”  

She said the methodology does that by providing a highly structured, scalable and teachable set of tools and methods for innovation. These include new conversational approaches to problem solving that are dialogue-based, so they help organizations bring divergent stakeholder groups into the conversation to find new solutions to problems.  

This is immensely valuable to businesses, added David Kester, managing director of David Kester & Associates (DK&A). “The wisdom you get from so many people working in diverse groups — that’s where you get the speed, the smart thinking, and the real creativity going, as you have so many different viewpoints working together.”  

Human-centered design

Kester provided a real-world example of a four-stage design thinking process at the front end of innovation, the starting point where opportunities are identified and concepts are developed prior to formal product development. His organization  teamed up with the multinational software corporation SAP to reduce the prevalence of single-use plastics in modern life. These products have a well-documented and negative environmental impact because they never fully degrade and end up being ingested by marine life.  

The first step, discovery, entails home visits, user workshops and interviews with 24 consumers representing a diverse demographic mix to see what single-use plastics they were using daily, and why. The second step was to define project briefs, a short description of the key tasks at hand that might contribute towards solutions for these problems.    

The third step was develop, which saw the team engaging in a process of co-creation, ideation and visualization of potential products in a workshop involving 30 big companies. The fourth and final step was delivery, which involved prototyping, and evaluating the results of user testing. The best ideas taken forward as prototypes were tried in the marketplace to build user adoption.   

Kester said the benefit of these four steps was not just a faster time to innovation, but high team engagement, earned media value (the monetary value of the audience’s engagement with digital content) and a busy innovation pipeline for the companies involved in the workshop.