Design Thinking as a Methodology for Innovation - Article Example

Design Thinking Design thinking is defined as a methodology for innovation, placing the interaction environment that promotes creative design on the centre stage (Plattner , Meinel & Weinberg, 2009). Design thinking is a strategic tool for business leadership. It is heuristic because it creates its own rules that enable business leaders to solve the marketplace and the production factory mysteries. The heuristic tasks of design thinking include motivating disgruntling employees, forging supplier relationships, and understanding customer delight. It is the role of CEOs and other top business leaders to be masters of heuristics mentioned above. Designing is a tool powerful enough to bring a change. It is not just a mere tool for styling products and communications. Creative designers devise tools, actions, and methods that they use to change existing situation into preferred ones. DT is a user-centered approach to innovation and business leadership can learn from the practice of designers. Most of the previous work on design thinking (DT) is mainly theoretical. Organisational managers are increasingly searching for alternative approaches to innovation. As a result, the majority of these managers are focusing their interests in design. Brown (2008) has discussed how organisations can benefit from design thinking. He suggests that business managers can apply a design approach to any innovation challenge that they may encounter within the organisation. Design thinking is a distinct approach, separate from other problem-solving approaches. Plattner, Meinel and Leifer (2013) examines the aspects that distinguish design thinking from other problem-solving approaches. DT is unique because it helps foster creativity and aesthetically appealing product design. There are specific affective and cognitive processes involved when managers engage themselves in design thinking. Brown (2008) supports this view because he interprets DT as a conceptualisation of the way designers think and work. A previous study has argued that design thinking is a methodology for innovation that integrates human, technical, and business factors in problem-forming, problem-solving, and designs (Plattner et al., 2013). Another researcher argued that design thinking approach encompasses three broad phases namely inspiration, ideation, and implementation (Brown, 2008). In the inspiration phase, the players are motivated to search for solutions. The ideation phase involves generation and development of ideas and finally, implementation phase involves bringing the products to the market. In addition, DT is a concept that imbues the full idea of innovation with user-centered design ethos (Brown, 2008). In general, DT consists specific individual-level and social level factors that determine the design outcome. Therefore, DT comprises of both individual inputs as well as group’s input. In addition, it includes attention, memory, and learning and leads to an aesthetically appealing object. In the perspective of business management, design thinking attracted interests from 1990s. During this period, organisations were undergoing major changes. Some of the early adopters were business organisations in Europe and United States and they include such organisations such as Porsche (Leifer, Plattner & Meinel, 2013). These organisations achieved efficiency gains by integrating Lean in their operations. As observed by Cross (2009), human beings have a long history of design thinking evidenced by the artefacts of previous civilisations. He argues that to design things is normal for human beings. The concept of design thinking progressed historically from mysteries to heuristic to algorithms to binary and finally to the complementary paradigm of design thinking (Oster, 2008). DT application in management can be traced in 2000 in California where management scholars collaborated with Californian design firm IDEO (Martin, 2009). Management scholars’ objectives were to observe how designers work. Today, managers who are employing design thinking are unique because they are willing to direct their focus on efficiency and innovation. Martin (2009) explores the notion of knowledge funnel arguing that DT enables business leaders to create value by moving their ideas through knowledge funnel. He further argues that organisations that follow this process gain competitive advantage and become responsible for new breakthroughs, altering the world as it is known today. DT follows three steps namely the mystery, the heuristic, and the algorithm (Martin, 2009). How the architect resolves conflicting demands on a project remains a mystery of the creative mind. The mystery presupposes that there is a kind of thinking that is logical, analytical and rational. Design inherits a style of rhetoric whose origins lie deep within the Romantic Movement in art (Snodgrass & Coyne, 2013). Claims to the mystery are acceptable in design thinking. The authors further argue that there is a strong historical tradition that allows the application of mystery to design thinking. The reason the managers approach DT from art perspective is that the licence to apply metaphors of mystery to design is not granted to management (Snodgrass & Coyne, 2013). On the other hand, the heuristic provides a simplified way of thinking that deals with mystery. For example, fast food businesses arose from the mystery of how people who existed before the Second World War wanted to eat. The algorithm converts the heuristic into a fixed procedure or method. For a business organisation to achieve success, they have to be moved through this knowledge funnel; that is from mystery to heuristic to the algorithm (Martin, 2009). To achieve this breakthrough, DT recruits a unique set of interacting mechanisms. For example, when DT processes are applied in the management of an organisation, the management pays attention to problems within the organisation as well as device new approaches that lead to new, creative ideas. DT consist creativity and creativity is a combination of specific cognitive processes that interact (Plattner et al., 2013). The key influencers of design thinking include the business managers and executives, sales and marketing staff, technical experts, and departmental heads among others. Intuit is one of the companies that is utilising DT as one of its key competencies. One of its major challenges was maintaining leadership in the creation of customer value through innovation. DT provided Intuit with a set of principles and tools for engaging employees across the organisation more creatively about enhancing value for customers. Intuit is considered to be a pace setter in design thinking (Liedtka, King & Bennett, 2013). Intuit has an initiative dubbed Design for Delight, which is aimed at moving beyond using design thinking to solve problems to making it a core competency of employees throughout the organisation. Kareen Hanson is the head of the design innovation and she has a team that offers surprising findings and solid benchmarks that are helpful in the whole organisation. Figure 1 represents Intuit’s ‘Delight for Design’ initiative. Deep Customer Empathy Go Broad To DELIGHT Go Narrow Rapid Experiments With Customers Figure 1Delight for Design. Adopted from Liedtka et al. (2013) Intuit’s management innovates systematically. The management also allows the other employees autonomy of tapping into their own passion for delighting Intuit’s customers and grow the organisation. Employees watch and listen to the customers, and even visit them in their homes and workplaces so as to discover and solve the problems related with Intuit’s products. The mainstay to Intuit’s success is “Design for Delight” (Liedtka et al., 2013). Design for Delight (D4D) is Intuit’s way of looking at design thinking. D4D is Intuit’s knowledge funnel which has helped it to achieve a new breakthrough and alter how other similar businesses conduct their innovativeness. Intuit has used this knowledge funnel to go beyond customer expectations. This knowledge funnel helped the company to deliver unique product experiences that every customer enjoys. In Intuit’s case, ‘the mystery’ involves knowing the customer better than they know themselves (Deep customer empathy). In line with Martins (2009), Intuit presupposes that there is a kind of thinking that is logical and one that can be used to help the customer. Innovators are an unstructured time to pursue their ideas depending on the kind of idea. Intuit’s heuristic (Go broad to go narrow) provides the organisation with a way of identifying what the customer needs and beyond. Through the algorithm (Rapid experiments with customers), Intuit devises new ways of helping its customers. To solve its customers’ problems and achieve success, Intuit employs a unique set of an interacting mechanism. In consistent with Plattner et al. (2013), Intuit’s D4D team combines the creativities of different people within the team. One of the successes that is attributable to the application of DT in Intuit is SnapTax. SSnapTax is an application that is used by customers to prepare and file simple tax returns on their iPhones in few seconds. The conceptualisation came from a small team using its unstructured time (Liedtka et al., 2013). Another example of a company that has incorporated DT in its company is Procter & Gamble. The key influencers in P&G include the CEO of P&G, A.G. Lafley, the head of the design initiative at P&G, Claudia Kotchka, and the industrial design firm, IDEO (Martin, 2009). The team developed new design processes at P&G, a move that has played a great role in raising the competitive advantage of P&G. Business process management is at the heart of organisations. Process management provides methods and concepts used in capturing, analysing, and improving operational procedures in a business organisation. Innovative business managers can use design thinking principles to improve their business process models. In conclusion, business organisations should take caution when adopting DT and make sure that DT teams do not contradict themselves as they come up with potential value proposition. References Brown, T. (2008). Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review, 86(6), pp. 84–92.  Leifer, L., Plattner, H. and Meinel, C. (2013). Design Thinking Research: Building Innovation Eco-Systems. Heidelberg: Springer Science & Business Media Liedtka, J., King, A. and Bennett, K. (2013). Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works. New York: Columbia University Press. Martin, R. (2009). The design of business: why design thinking is the next competitive advantage. Boston: Harvard Business Press. Oster, G. (2008). Derailing Design Thinking. International Journal of Leadership Studies, 4(1), pp. 107-115. Plattner, H., Meinel, C. and Leifer, L. (2013). Design Thinking: Understand – Improve – Apply. Heidelberg: Springer Science & Business Media. Plattner, H., Meinel, C. and Weinberg, U. (2009). Design Thinking. Munich: mi-Wirtschaftsbuch Snodgrass, A. and Coyne, R.( 2013). Interpretation in Architecture: Design as Way of Thinking. London: Routledge. Appendix Read More