Design Thinking: A Tested Method for Creating Breakthrough

Innovation
While the word innovation thunders from the boardroom and from the
ranks, few companies actually build a sustainable process for generating real
solutions that create value. Instead, they hastily focus on un-validated and
over-caffeinated pet ideas of the CEO. Or worse, they spend a lot of time and
resources recreating a slightly different version of their same core offering.
The two, too common scenarios noted above are not innovation. Real
innovation is not a product line extension or an additional feature. Spare us.
The world is already surfeited with such nonsense.
Real innovation requires thinking outside of your own business paradigm.
Real innovations that make major traction in the market solve problems
people didnt know they had. Real innovations get out of the office and
embody the matter. They walk in the shoes of the intended audience, even
visit them at home or their office. They begin with empathy, then follow an
iterative process, and then reap substantial rewards.
This formal innovation process was named just a few years ago. While it
remains contested, Design Thinking is a set of principlesfrom mindset and
roles to processthat work for consumer products, software, services, even
in the social sector.
Design Thinking is a method for solving complex problems. Think of Design
Thinking as installing a new operating system for life: its that revolutionary.
Looking at the world with an inspired eye for redesigning every aspect that
could be improved is the mindset. There are few experiences that could not
be improved.
As noted by Tim Brown, now the CEO of IDEO, there are three spaces to
explore, which overlap: inspiration, ideation, and implementation.
Heres the skinny version:
Inspiration: the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for
solutions: this stage involves interviewing, observing, sketches, mock-ups,
and scenario-building.

Ideation: the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas:

this stage involves building prototypes & exploring the balance between
practical functionality and emotional appeal.

Implementation: the path that leads from the project room to the
market: this stage involves clearly communicating the idea and
proving/showing that it will work, and validating a business model for the
concept.
Design Thinking follows a seven-step framework: define, research, ideate,
prototype, choose, implement, and learn. These steps overlap one another
and are repeated in iterations to produce concepts that work.
While Design Thinking came out of product development, graphic design, and
engineering fields, its processes and spaces are being adopted by research
and development, marketing, and product management departments in
many firms across the globe.
The process requires some non-linear thinking and allows for the devils
advocate role to be voiced. For these reasons, many companies cannot allow
it into their cultureto their own detriment and decline.
Companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Target, Apple, IKEA, as well as Bank of
America, the Mayo Clinic and a host of others you know by name are defining
market trends and market cap by employing elements of Design Thinking in
their innovation efforts.
If your boardroom and hallways thunder with the call to innovate, get real. Try
some processes with proven efficacy. Don't just rush into tomorrow the same
as yesterday with a little more haste and stress.