Tim Brown of IDEO defines design thinking a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

As business leaders look to innovation as a source of differentiation and competitive advantage, Tim argues that they should be incorporating design thinking into all phases of the process.

Thinking beyond the light bulb

In an article for Harvard Review he credits Thomas Edison as the first to adopt ‘design thinking’.

When Edison invented the lightbulb, he understood that without electricity generation and transmission it would remain a parlour trick. So, he conceived a fully developed marketplace to ensure adoption of the disruptive technology.

Additionally, he created a team-based approach to innovation, that aimed not to validate preconceived hypothesis but to help the experimenters to learn something new. Design thinking is a development of these ideas.

Human-centred design ethos requires a deep understanding of what people want and need in their lives and what they like and dislike about products are made, packaged, marketed and sold.

How design thinking happens

Tim says that conceptually design thinking consists of three spaces:

1. Inspiration – the problem/opportunity that motivates the search for solutions
2. Ideation – process of generating, developing, and testing ideas
3. Implementation – charting the path to market.

He explains that design thinking is not limited to products, it can also be used to redesign services. He gives this example of improving shift handovers by nurses.

Inspiration: It was taking 45 minutes to provide a debrief on the status of patients and many important factors were being missed.

Ideation: Following observation, brainstorming, and prototyping, the team – which included the nurses – developed some easy-to-use software that captured events and they moved the debrief to the patient’s bed.

This enabled more effective communication with the patient, reducing stress for them and their family, reduced the time in the debrief, and ensured more comprehensive collation of information. This was a small process innovation that delivered outsize impact.

Implementation: Following the success of this pilot, the human-centric design approach was adopted more widely, so that every doctor, nurse, and administrator at the hospital felt empowered to tackle problems.

Integrating design thinking into innovation process

Tim recommends an eight-step process:

1. Involve design thinkers at the very start of the innovation – this will enable more ideas to be explored more quickly
2. Use a human-centric approach – direct observation can offer unexpected insights and capture more precisely what consumers want
3. Rapid experimentation and prototyping – measure progress through time to first prototype, number of consumers exposed to prototypes
4. Co-create with customers and consumers – enlarge the scale of your innovation team
5. Initiate revolutionary innovation from the top – expect business teams to fund and drive incremental innovation but be prepared to fund more disruptive innovation
6. Adjust budget to pace of innovation – don’t constrain innovation through cumbersome budgeting cycles
7. Diversify talent recruitment – interdisciplinary programs train designers that can push beyond expectations.
8. Experience the full cycle – plan so design thinkers see the project through from inspiration, ideation, and implementation.

Explore design thinking for yourself

IDEO provides free resources including the design kit which provides easy-to-use tools for each for the three spaces.

https://www.designkit.org/methods.html

Tim is also the author of the best seller Change by Design