Design Thinking: The Innovator’s Tool

You will agree with me that today’s businesses need to innovate at a rapid pace whilst being human-centered in order to stay relevant. We need processes aimed at solving complex problems unconventionally with interdisciplinarity, empathy and innovation at its heart.

How often have you wished for the multidisciplinary teams behind developing a product to work together and literally ‘go back to the drawing board’? How often have you wished for a process that encourages creative collaboration and approaches every problem as an opportunity to learn and grow?

Here’s the deal: Such a process already exists! Meet Design Thinking! It is not just a process but also a mindset that is simultaneously curious and empathetic. People in businesses, education, the public sector and research can employ it with the same ease that people in arts can use it.

As Prof. Leifer of Stanford and Prof. Meinel of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) point out, Design Thinking is a “unique combination of engineering, economics, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and design-research” which make it foundational and universally applicable.

This is the process that enables businesses to approach products as multifaceted nexuses of people, technology, and context. This is the highly flexible process which combines focused phases and fast iterations like salt and pepper.

Over the next few posts, I want to take you on a Design Thinking journey by sharing real-life experiences and expert discussions. Here’s a taste of what is in store:

· How a successful startup used Design Thinking to grow from a team of 5 to more than 50 in a year

· How product managers use a mixture of Design Thinking and Agile Management to ensure that their solutions are human-centered

· How to have meaningful Design Thinking sessions with your remote teams

· How to set up your innovation space with relevant Design Thinking tools

· How the public sector can use Design Thinking to make relevant policies

Stay tuned!