Design Thinking as a Framework for Innovation.
In the recent years two words that keep turning up in strategic decision making are design thinking and innovation. But due to the similar scope of the two terms they are often confused with the other and their meaning gets convoluted. As a practitioner of Design Thinking in my role as a Design & Innovation Strategist, I am most often asked to bring clarity on the terminology and explain the differences. As a way to answer those who requested my answer and for others who might have similar questions, I initiate this blog. Moreover, I like the idea of having a dedicated space to record my thoughts on design and its role in the business and society. This I believe will provide me twofold benefits — first, as a way to gather my thoughts as I research, prepare and document my thoughts, methods and perspectives; secondly, it functions as a journal to document my understanding on the topic as I grow in my career.
Though these terms have evolved separately these terms have been brought together due to the recent trends and developments in technology, the society and the business models. As digitalisation and globalisation advance into the society the consumers and users have more options in terms of products and solutions and they are becoming more informed about their needs. In this competitive landscape people look into their needs and demand solutions that apart from meeting functional goals, are also able to add value and meaning to their needs. This change in the market has forced companies to rethink how they develop products and offer value. Traditional models and methodologies are not able to satisfy and keep up with the demands from the consumers, leading brands and businesses to find alternative approaches to bring sustainable growth.
Here is the animated version that gives a quick overview on my views. Continue reading for an indepth understanding on my viewpoints.
IDEO’s three lenses
This is where Design thinking and Innovation come into play. For this purpose, IDEO’s three lenses diagram will be helpful in visualising the differences between the terms and to plot the scope of their practices. IDEO’s defines that: for any venture to be successful they need to cater to three core perspectives — namely Desirability, Feasibility and Viability. Metaphorically they can be considered to be the legs of an organisation. Lacking any one perspective leads to an unstable foundation that affects the venture’s growth.
Desirability focuses on the end users, the market needs and customers. It delves into human needs and requirements. At the end each product, service or solution is targeted towards humans, therefore understanding human emotions, behaviour and psychology helps in developing and delivering meaningful and valuable products. Generally, designers, design and social researchers provide the required insights on human motivation, contextual behaviour and decision process for the companies to build desirable solutions.
Feasibility is developing solutions and deliver them into the hands of the customer, consumers and users. It forms the R&D, product and technology development, and engineering divisions to collaborate. They are in most cases the backbone of any organisation.
Viability is the ability to successfully execute and implement a business model. It includes day-to-day activities of the business operations that are necessary to make sure that the business stays afloat and generates revenue. It does not make sense that one puruses a business model that is not profitable.
Evolution of Design thinking and Innovation
Design was used to meet the customer needs and develop products that are functional, appealing and desirable. By the end of last century, design worked on artefacts and reaching out to the consumers. As businesses evolved design grew to become a core part of how businesses gained competitive advantage. Once it was publically available this advantage was negated as the designs was easily duplicated by competitors. To overcome this organisations were actively looking for new methodologies and techniques.
Innovation is a methodology that was popularised in the last few decades to enable large technology companies to create breakthroughs and gain competitive advantage. Theoretically it is said to bring together desirability, feasibility and viability. To me Innovation is an outcome where products change traditional paradigms and are economically viable to pursue. This is what led all the technology brands to be successful — they took technology they were developing and applied them to change the traditional perspectives and this is what made companies and the respective products innovative. Apple, Google and other brands were considered to be innovative because their products redefined how the industry and society viewed the particular segment and they are able to generate revenues from those products. Though innovation was helpful in converting technology into applications, there existed a gap in making solutions desirable. As the economy grew more global and connected, customers started demanding value added services and experiences that are not covered by innovation. To fulfill this growing demands organisations turned to design as they were successful in creating desirable products and reaching out to consumers through appealing messages. Over a period this approach grew to become Design Thinking.
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
— Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
Design thinking evolves from traditional design practices and methods. To satisfy the customers demanding services and experiences required an unique, creative problem-solving mindset and an ability to work in iterative process that is explorative and value-centred. Designers were already well equipped and suited to pursue this activity as they already practised these techniques to develop products and visual content. Technological innovations that provided the edge over competition were easily replicated, compared to them the value added services and experiences were difficult to recreate as they incorporated the brand’s intangible aspects together to create emotional attachments among consumers. Thus these services and experiences began to provide an edge over competition, leading companies to adopt them in large scale leading design thinking to become popular. Though initially termed as design-driven innovation, IDEO’s use of Design thinking became more popular as developed strategies and services for top companies, which led to others utilising the same terminology.
Differences between the terminology using IDEO’s lenses
To better understand the differences, I plot design, innovation and design thinking in the three lenses diagram. This is made as I see them and how I see their role in the overall picture. I derive this conclusion based on the definitions, the scope of the terms and their use cases.
Since traditional design has always been about developing artefacts and messages that are functional and meaningful to the consumers I identified them to bring value on desirability and feasibility. Until recently design was limited to operation levels and tactical levels to cover value creation and delivery processes.
Innovation has always dealt with the ability to successfully transform technology feasibility into viable opportunities. It takes what is existing and create application that revolutionise the industry. Though there is some consideration for desirability they are in practice largely oriented towards economic aspects of business and market value. Majority of innovation methods are oriented towards developing better products for the business rather than developing desirable products for end users. End users are not involved or any say in the decision making process. Therefore I consider them to be made of feasibility and viability aspects. In practice, innovation is all about the economic value generated by the specific application — and if that method is successful.
I consider Design thinking to be an evolutionary development of innovation and design. At its core, design thinking is about humans and bringing human-focus into strategic decisions making. It involves understanding the market as users and consumers who have needs, and developing solutions that cater to those needs rather than pushing unappealing solutions. Since it brings together a focus on desirability with feasibility and viability, I consider this to be the main reason Design thinking is growing in popularity — it helps develop experiential solutions and customer(or user) oriented strategies that provide competitive edge.
Conclusion
To summarise, Design thinking or design-driven innovation is a pragmatic viewpoint on building solutions for the users who need them, so that they will continue to be your customers. It brings together best aspects of design methods and innovation management principles so that businesses can quickly develop solutions, easily test their value and efficiently deliver them to customers. By bring together the different aspects of desirability, feasibility and viability early in the development, businesses are able to make strategic decisions even before investing and evaluate the returns gained from this venture. This is what makes it more appealing to organisations in comparison to other methodologies.
