Design Thinking in Management

Suhas Tambe
 Introduction
Creativity, Innovations and Design Thinking

• What is Creativity?
• What is an Innovation?
• What is a Design?
 Creativity

• New Ideas are necessary for industry

• Are these products of clearly defined steps?
• What decides an idea is good?
Critical mass
• Good managers have the ability to recognize a good idea and
use it to make things happy in a different way or useful
products, services or systems.
 Creativity
• Innovation (bring something new – idea, method device) draws
together new ideas
• Creativity is the having of new ideas which in organisation are
generated or spotted by individuals or teams
• Creativity means the process by which novel but situationally
appropriate outcomes are brought about.
• It requires a different approach to the situation on hand.
• It involves the ability to find solutions to problems by changing your
point of view when normal channels fail to give you the answers
you need
What are innovations and what is their
impact?
• Innovations are novelties which add economic value and may be
technological, market and /or organizational in orientation.
• It may take the form of a new machine, a new way of doing things or may
involve redesigning an existing product for a niche market or changing
how work is carried out in an organization
• Technological innovations can thus add economic value as some
combination of changes in goods and services, including production
processes and organization.
• By adding novelty to the economy, innovations thereby change the
conditions of competition for firms and open up room for further technical
improvements and profits
• Thus firms in sectors with rapidly changing technologies and dynamic
competition have to make continuous improvements and learn
• Technological changes or innovations are crucial processes
underlying dynamic changes in advanced market economies
• Lead to changes in productivity and to economic growth for
national economies e.g., the development and diffusion of
agricultural machinery has replaced many manual jobs in
agriculture but has also created new jobs in the design and
production of machinery
• In the long term, economic growth and increased social welfare
usually involve major upheavals, including changing patterns of
productivity and job creation in different parts of the economy
• Technological innovation processes are important because they
introduce dynamics into economic growth and impact the wider
society
• Resulting technical changes may lead to dramatic changes in the
economy, and eventually in individual’s daily lives or to relatively
insignificant changes
• The car and surrounding road system has radically changed how
modern societies are organized and the structure of production, but
there are also insignificant changes such as yearly improvements in
existing car models
• In other words innovation process can result in changes which are
somewhere in between radical and incremental
• Few technologies like genetic engineering and information
technology are more radical than others because they can affect
different aspects of the economy and society .
 Roles of creativity and invention in
Innovation
• Invention relies solely on creativity while innovation requires a plan
• Innovation occurs at a much faster pace than invention and is more
directly affected by market shifts. Innovation does not refer to
products or processes only but also to innovation in engineering,
manufacturing, purchasing and marketing.
• An inventor views things differently, he makes the impossible
possible.
• E.g. Velcro, Vaseline
 Design
• A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or
system or for the implementation of an activity or process
• It can also be the result of that plan or specification in the form of
a prototype, product or process.
• "To design" as a verb expresses the process of developing such a design.
• In some cases, the direct construction of an object without an explicit
prior plan (such as in craftwork and some engineering, coding, and graphic
design) may also be considered to be a design activity.
• A design usually has to satisfy certain goals and constraints, may take into
account aesthetic, functional, economic, or socio-political considerations,
and is expected to interact with a certain environment.
• Major examples of designs include architectural figures, engineering
drawings, business processes, circuit diagrams, and sewing patterns.
 What is design thinking?
• Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb
• Edison was also able to conceive of a fully developed
marketplace, not just a simple device.
• This was an early example of what is now called “design
thinking”—a process that uses the full spectrum of innovation
activities with a human-centered design ethos.
 Innovation and Design Thinking
• innovation is powered by a thorough understanding,
through direct observation, of what people
– want and need in their lives and
– what they like or dislike about the way particular
products are
• made
• packaged
• marketed
• sold and
• supported.
 Innovation and Design Thinking
• Edison wasn’t just a narrowly specialized scientist but also a
broad generalist with a shrewd business sense.
• Shattered the image of the lone genius inventor
• Responsible for the modern R and D laboratory
• the process also features endless rounds of trial and error
—the “99% perspiration” in Edison’s famous definition of
genius
 Innovation and Design Thinking
• His approach was intended not to validate preconceived
hypotheses but to help experimenters learn something new
from each iterative stab.
• Innovation is hard work;
• Edison made it a profession that blended
– art,
– craft,
– science,
– business savvy, and
– an astute understanding of customers and markets.
 Innovation and Design Thinking
• Design thinking is a lineal descendant of that tradition.
• It is simply, 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.
• Like Edison’s painstaking innovation process, it often entails a
great deal of perspiration.
 Need for Design Thinking
• Historically, design has been treated as a downstream step in the
development process—
– where designers, while having no role in the substantive work of
innovation,
– put a beautiful wrapper around the idea.
• This approach has stimulated market growth in many areas
– by making new products and technologies aesthetically
attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or
– by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative
advertising and communication strategies.
• During the latter half of the twentieth century design became
an increasingly valuable competitive asset in, for example, the
consumer electronics, automotive, and consumer packaged
goods industries. But in most others it remained a late-stage
add-on.
• Nowadays companies are asking designers to create ideas that
better meet consumers’ needs and desires.
• Rather than asking them to make an already developed idea
more attractive to consumers
• The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation
• The latter is strategic, leads to dramatic new forms of value.
 Innovation and Design Thinking
• Moreover, as economies in the developed world shift from
industrial manufacturing to knowledge work and service delivery,
innovation’s terrain is expanding.
• Its objectives are no longer just physical products; they are new
sorts of
– processes,
– services,
– IT-powered interactions,
– entertainments, and
– ways of communicating and collaborating—
• exactly the kinds of human-centered activities in which design
thinking can make a decisive difference
 Kaiser Permanente
• Businesses in the service sector can often make significant
innovations on the front lines of service creation and delivery.
• By teaching design thinking techniques to nurses, doctors, and
administrators, Kaiser hoped to inspire its practitioners to
contribute new ideas
• project to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser
hospitals
• The core project team included a
– strategist (formerly a nurse),
– an organizational-development specialist, a technology
expert,
– a process designer,
– a union representative,
– and designers from IDEO.
• This group worked with innovation teams of frontline
practitioners in each of the four hospitals.
 A Design Thinker’s Personality Profile
• Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need weird shoes or a
black turtleneck to be a design thinker.
• Nor are design thinkers necessarily created only by design
schools, even though most professionals have had some kind
of design training.
• many people outside professional design have a natural
aptitude for design thinking, which the right development and
experiences can unlock.
 Characteristics of Design Thinkers
Empathy.
• They can imagine the world from multiple perspectives—
those of colleagues, clients, end users, and customers (current
and prospective).
• By taking a “people first” approach, design thinkers can
imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet
explicit or latent needs.
• Great design thinkers observe the world in minute detail.
• They notice things that others do not and use their insights to
inspire innovation.
Integrative thinking.
• They not only rely on analytical processes (those that produce
either/ or choices)
• They also exhibit the ability to see all of the salient—and
sometimes contradictory— aspects of a confounding problem
and
– create novel solutions that go beyond and dramatically improve on
existing alternatives.
Optimism.
• They assume that no matter how challenging the constraints
of a given problem,
– at least one potential solution is better than the existing
alternatives.
Experimentalism
• Significant innovations don’t come from incremental tweaks.
• Design thinkers pose questions and explore constraints in
creative ways that proceed in entirely new directions.
Collaboration.
• The increasing complexity of
– products,
– services, and
– experiences
• This has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the
reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator.
• The best design thinkers don’t simply work alongside other
disciplines;
– many of them have significant experience in more than one.
• People who are engineers and marketers, anthropologists and
industrial designers, architects and psychologists.
 Tim Brown urges designers to think big
[Link]

Connecting People to a Healthy Future With

Personalized Care – Kaiser Permanente
[Link]
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 How Design Thinking Happens
• The design process is best described metaphorically as
– a system of spaces rather than
– a predefined series of orderly steps.
• The spaces demarcate different sorts of related activities that
together form the continuum of innovation.
• Design thinking can feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the first
time.
• But over the life of a project its architecture differs from the linear,
milestone based processes typical of other kinds of business
activities.
• Design projects must ultimately pass through three spaces
• These are
– “inspiration,” for the circumstances (be they a problem, an
opportunity, or both) that motivate the search for solutions
– “ideation,” for the process of generating, developing, and
testing ideas that may lead to solutions; and
– “implementation,” for the charting of a path to market
• Projects will loop back through these spaces—particularly the first
two— more than once as ideas are refined and new directions
taken.
 How to Make Design Thinking Part of
the Innovation Drill
Begin at the beginning.
• Involve design thinkers at the very start of the innovation
process, before any direction has been set.
• Design thinking will help you explore more ideas more quickly
than you could otherwise.
Take a human-centered approach.
• Along with business and technology considerations,
innovation should factor in human behaviour, needs, and
preferences.
• Human-centered design thinking—
– especially when it includes research based on direct
observation—
– will capture unexpected insights and produce innovation
that more precisely reflects what consumers want.
Try early and often.
• Create an expectation of rapid experimentation and
prototyping.
• Encourage teams to create a prototype in the first week of a
project.
• Measure progress with a metric such as average time to first
prototype or number of consumers exposed to prototypes
during the life of a program.
Seek outside help.
• Expand the innovation ecosystem by looking for opportunities
to co-create with customers and consumers.
• Exploit networks to enlarge the effective scale of your
innovation team.
Blend big and small projects.
• Manage a portfolio of innovation that stretches from shorter-
term incremental ideas to longer-term revolutionary ones.
• Expect business units to drive and fund incremental
innovation, but be willing to initiate revolutionary innovation
from the top.
Budget to the pace of innovation.
• Design thinking happens quickly, yet the route to market can
be unpredictable.
• Don’t constrain the pace at which you can innovate by relying
on cumbersome budgeting cycles.
• Be prepared to rethink your funding approach as projects
proceed and teams learn more about opportunities.
Find talent any way you can.
• Look to hire from interdisciplinary programs
• People with more-conventional design backgrounds can push
solutions far beyond your expectations.
• You may even be able to train non-designers with the right
attributes to excel in design-thinking roles.
Design for the cycle.
• In many businesses people move
• But design projects may take longer than that to get from day
one through implementation.
• Plan assignments so that design thinkers go from inspiration
to ideation to implementation.
• Experiencing the full cycle builds better judgment and creates
great long-term benefits for the organization.
Case Study

• Infinite Vision: The Story of Aravind Eye

Hospital

• [Link]
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