Design Thinking - Insights

Design thinking is a methodology that permeates the full spectrum of innovation activities with a humancentered design approach. It uses the designers sensibility to match peoples needs with what is
technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market
opportunity. Design thinking is a human-centered, creative, iterative and practical approach to finding the
best ideas and solutions through insights gained from understanding the consumer and the customer.
Incorporating design thinking to all phases of a business process can be a principal source of differentiation
and competitive advantage in a world where most management ideas and best practices can be easily
copied.
Design thinking involves hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery process and followed
by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement. The design process is best described
metaphorically as a system of spaces demarcating different sorts of related activities that together form the
continuum of innovation: (1) Inspiration Circumstances that motivate the search for solutions (2) Ideation
Process of generating, developing, and testing ideas that may lead to solutions (3) Implementation - charting
of a path to market. Inspiration involves identifying the business problem and opportunity, observation of the
world, finding out business constraints, involving other disciplines like marketing from the start, exploring
role of technology, organizing information, etc. Ideation, on the other hand, involves brainstorming, building
creative frameworks, applying integrative thinking by putting customers in the midst of everything,
prototyping, etc. Finally, Implementation means executing the vision and engineering the experience. To
make design thinking part of the innovation drill, many steps need to be followed like involving design
thinkers from the very start of the innovation process, taking a human-centered approach to innovation,
creating an expectation of rapid experimentation and prototyping, looking for opportunities to co-create with
customers, managing a portfolio of innovation that stretches from short term incremental ideas to long term
revolutionary ones, hiring from interdisciplinary programs and so on.
In services, designing consumer experiences is a key differentiating point. The focus is on changing
organizations to focus on the consumer. IDEO, a world-renowned design firm has come out with a five-step
process of designing a better consumer experience: (1) Observation Understand the consumer experience
by observing people (2) Brainstorming Intense, idea-generating session analyzing data gathered by
observing people (3) Rapid prototyping Building mock-ups of working models quickly and cheaply thus
helping to visualize possible solutions and speeding up decision-making (4) Refining - Narrowing down the
choices to a few possibilities so as to reach at the best possible solution (5) Implementation - Actually
creating the product or service.
To enable an organization to embrace a design-thinking culture, one effective way can be through a team of
design-thinking coachesInnovation Catalystswho could help managers work on design initiatives
throughout the organization. This process involves managers identify customer pain points through direct
field research, brainstorm about how to reduce them, and swiftly prototype solutions. In addition, design
professionals can and should take on leadership roles in nontraditional arenas. The ways in which designers
address problems, leveraging emotional intelligence, integral intelligence, and experiential intelligence, can
offer organizations valuable insights across a diverse range of business activities and decision-making. Taking
advantage of design thinking can help business leaders make their intentions realby clearly defining goals,
deeply understanding customers, and getting their internal teams aligned to deliver results. Design thinking
needs to be seen as another valuable tool to help shape business strategies and connect intentions to
outcomes. Its time to unleash the power of design thinking in every professional endeavor, not just design
itself.