Innovation rates increase highly when design principles are applied to strategy and innovation. Design-led companies, such as Apple, Pepsi, IBM, Nike, and Procter & Gamble, have beat the S&P 500 over 10 years by a remarkable 211% according to the 2015 Design Value Index.
The way that leading companies make value is by transforming through design. The focus of innovation has shifted from product-driven to client-driven, engineering-driven to design-driven, and from marketing-focused to user-experience-focused. Design thinking is a crucial component of viable strategy development and organizational transformation for a growing number of CEOs.
The most crucial factor is the rapid pace of technological advancements in the world of business and society caused by improvements in innovation. As businesses become more computer-driven, the speed of change accelerates, and complexity increases.
Design Thinking: What exactly is it?
It is the best and most well-known method of problem-solving for UX designers. The process of design thinking was established as a professional and educational tool in the late 1990s by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO. Like the method of science usually taught in primary school, design thinking follows five steps:
- Empathize
- Ideate
- Define
- Prototype
- Test
Design thinking can be described as a generalization anyone can freely use and reference when tackling complex issues. The process of design thinking can be described as a technique that, when executed properly, involves many steps and encourages failure as a tool to learn.
Innovation is the Core Benefit of Design Thinking
Implementing design thinking can be a terrific way to generate new ideas. Your team will go through each phase of the cycle, often hitting each one more than once as you develop new ideas and solutions. While most ideologies and frameworks can be broken down into steps or stages, design thinking doesn’t require you to follow a strict, ordered approach. You can switch between processes and cycles until you find the right solution.
Design thinking is an essential tool for making new technologies user-friendly and a positive approach to technology’s rapid change. It embraces all possibilities and has a positive outlook, and this attitude will become more critical as companies discover new ways to use emerging technology.
Innovation: The Difficulty
Successful innovation processes must deliver innovative solutions, lower risks, and costs of change, and be accepted by employees. Still, organizations often face problems when implementing innovative approaches.
Superior solutions
Teams must develop innovative solutions by asking new questions that go beyond the boundaries of traditional thinking. It can lead to teams getting stuck on the problems for too long, while action-oriented managers get too eager to find new solutions. Although it is beneficial to bring in different perspectives, it can lead to divisive discussions.
Reduce costs and risks
Innovation is defined by uncertainty. Innovation teams must have various options to diversify resources, not just to focus on one idea but trying to generate too many of them and further dilute them. This issue requires sacrifices, and people often eradicate riskier and creative ideas to overcome them.
Employees acceptance
It won’t succeed if the employees don’t support the ideas. To win their support, it is a good idea to include employees in the idea generation phase. Without a leader who can make balanced trade-offs, this can be hard. The operational strategy needs to generate variations in the innovation process to achieve goals while driving it to stability. Also, a design thinking certificate becomes a crucial requirement before joining any company. Social technology is required to identify behavioral obstacles to manage all this.
Design Thinking is a way to invent
Design thinking is often the first thought that people have about it, and it can help them address their particular needs. Here are some ways it can be an essential tool in driving innovations:
Innovation is possible by bringing structure to it.
A business with any structure or limitations does not limit the business process. However, business team managers are not responsible for the design and customer interaction. Managers can keep their operations under control by using design thinking to innovate processes. This structure eliminates the wasteful time and impatient executions.
A holistic approach to solving problems.
Design thinking encourages teams to look beyond the technical aspects, and instead of focusing on the technical, it persuades them to consider the business and logical aspects of solving problems. It is unnecessary to solve well-known or tamed issues; design thinking is needed to address multifaceted, complex problems.
It’s not just a process.
Design thinking should not be viewed as a way to solve problems. It is a mindset that can also be used wherever innovation or out-of-the-box thinking is required. You can use it in conjunction with other strategies, methods, and practices.
It’s all about human-centered innovations.
Companies are fighting for attention in today’s competitive world. Modern users have high expectations and are not satisfied with the traditional linear and conformist approaches. Design thinking provides the tools to meet demands, create trends, and change the possible landscape.
Design Thinking Principles
Design thinking is the process of creating user-friendly designs and delivering technology intuitively and naturally to users. A few core principles define design thinking. These principles are not meant to be a guideline for introducing design thinking to your business but rather the foundation of your design thinking strategy.
- Wicked problems: This phrase was created by Horst Rittel (design theorist), and Melvin Webber (“wicked issues”) refers to ill-defined, tricky problems that require creative thinking and nontraditional solutions.
- Design thinking: There are many ways to look at a problem. We shouldn’t take the problems as they are. Instead, problems are reframed and re-interpreted to find a solution.
- Design thinking is solution-focused: Instead of focusing only on the problems, a design thinking model focuses first on solutions. This can improve understanding of the problem.
- Abductive reasoning: This type of logical inference begins with an observation or set. Then, you are asked to find the simplest and most probable explanation for the observed problems. This is a key method of reasoning used in design thinking to help you reframe problems and ideas to find multiple solutions.
- Design thinkers can co-evolve problems and solutions: Design thinkers switch between looking at the problem and thinking of solutions when working on a problem.
- Representations and modeling: These two together form the last principle. Physical prototypes and computer models can be used to identify and refine requirements and allow your team to evaluate, test, and refine new ideas.
Conclusion
Design thinking is about identifying and approving a solution to a real problem. It also helps to increase the understanding of people who might use it. This will ensure a greater chance of a product or service being successful in the long term. You can learn this effective technique in universities such as Stanford. The Stanford design thinking course has covered all essential aspects to master design thinking.
You have a better chance of involving clients and partners in the process of defining the problem and developing solutions. This will increase your chances to take on responsibility and get buy-in for your innovations.
Ref 1 – https://www.dmi.org/page/2015DVIandOTW/2015-dmiDesign-Value-Index-Results-and-Commentary.htm
Ref 3 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype