design thinking

A NEW TREND - DESIGN THINKING IN INNOVATION PROCESS • IDEO- top 25 most innovative companies, Ranked #16 on Fortune’s list of 100 top MBA employers • FROG- more than 1.000 employees within interdisciplinary teams, clients include Disney, GE, HP, Intel, Microsoft, MTV, Qualcomm, Siemen • Business Week- not that many schools are teaching any such thing • Scopus search engine- not many articles appeared when searching for Design Thinking + Venture Creation (more articles exist about innovating businesses in large corporations) • Design thinking- not only designers can be trained to have a design thinking mind

WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING ?

Design thinking brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

A NON- LINEAR PROCESS The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions. Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas. Implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.

1. INSPIRATION

• The problem or opportunity that motivates people to search for solutions • The brief- hypothesis • Discover what people’s needs are- go out into the world and observe the actual experiences

2. IDEATION

• Divergent thinking- this approach helps multiply options to create choices and different insights about human behavior • Of course, more choices mean more complexity- the natural tendency of most organizations is to restrict choices in favor of the obvious and the incremental • Although this tendency may be more efficient in the short run, it tends to make an organization conservative and inflexible in the long run • Openness, curiosity, optimism, a tendency toward learning through doing, and experimentation

3. IMPLEMENTATION

• The best ideas generated during ideation are turned into a concrete, fully conceived action plan • Prototyping • Communication strategy- storytelling, particularly through multimedia

SYSTEMATIC PROBLEMS NEED SYSTEMATIC SOLUTIONS • One of the biggest impediments to adopting design thinking is simply fear of failure • As Yasmina Zaidman, director of knowledge and communications at Acumen Fund, put it, “The businesses we invest in require constant creativity and problem solving, so design thinking is a real success factor for serving the base of the economic pyramid.”

Design thinking can lead to hundreds of ideas and, ultimately, real world solutions that create better outcomes for organizations and the people they serve.

A DESIGN- THINKER’S PERSONALITY PROFILE

• • • • •

Empathy Integrative Thinking Optimism Experimentalism Collaboration

EMBRACING RISK TO LEARN, GROW AND INNOVATE • For designer, trying is more coveted than success. The real risk isn’t failing, it is not trying.

• Amplifying risk is a way to increase the amount of information one receives from experiments and prototypes.

• Madison Mount: “I’m slightly addicted to risk. If i’m not taking risks, I feel uncomfortable because I’m not learning” • Design thinking uniquely combines conscious risk taking with structured risk mitigation. Each of three behavioral building blocks of design thinking- empathy, prototyping, and storytelling- serves to simultaneously embrace and mitigate risks.

SEVEN WAYS TO GET STARTED

1. Cultivate an unreasonable obsession with desirability 2. Become more comfortable acting on your informed intuition 3. Prototype, prototype, prototype 4. Think big, but start smaller 5. Treat Money as positive constraint 6. Make a list of the best things that could happen 7. Seek challenges 0. Embrace risk and reap the rewards

HOW I DO IT

• 2 groups: 1. Design Thinking 2. Non Design Thinking • Interview questions