Design Thinking is not enough
Continuing our theme of blogs on the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) gathering in New York (you can read about here)…
Lisa Rauter, First Assistant Secretary, Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade Australia(DFAT) talked to donor group about a key lesson working with a design innovation firm in Australia, who had no prior experience of working in the development sector. Her lesson was clear: the ‘design thinking’ discipline alone is not the answer to tackling innovation challenges and delivering results.
Design thinking — a human-centered, prototype first, test, learn and iterate approach to designing products, services an business models — is critical in unlocking innovations that will scale. It means working hard at gaining real user insights and understanding of the problems/needs and then validating those insights through cycles of building and testing. However, design thinking has to be complimented with a broader set of skills that include: development research, technology strategy, product development and business planning. This is something that was echoed in our conversations with International Rescue Committee, who have brought in strategy consultants to work alongside designers, technical advisers and policy makers.
USAID, UNICEF, Rockefeller and most recently DFID (for our Frontier Technology programme) have separately engaged Dalberg’s Design Impact Group (DIG) to bring design thinking — the ability to identify user needs, develop user stories, design and build prototype solutions to test and iterate, and the methods and disciple to scale solutions — into programmes. DIG, set up inside Dalberg, benefits from a long history of development research, policy and strategy to work with. We also know that many of the agencies are working with IDEO and IDEO.org, Second Muse and Nesta.
The IDIA group all agreed that the following capability is needed within innovation teams and partners: contextual/domain knowledge, business planning and modelling, systems thinking, technology strategy and financial innovation. So, as a group we will look for others who can bring this mix of capability or come as part of a larger partner group.
