The Business Innovation Insider: Innovation through design thinking

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June 2, 2006

Innovation through design thinking

Tim Brown IDEO.jpg In an hour-long MIT World video, Tim Brown of IDEO explains the relationship between design thinking and innovation. According to Brown, design is everywhere around us - on the covers of business magazines, as part of consumer experiences at companies like Nike and Apple, and increasingly mentioned by Fortune 500 executives as an important way to grow a business. For many companies, design thinking is a way to create the future. To support this view, Tim Brown produces a wide array of examples from Corporate America. Motorola uses design thinking to create new products and service offerings. P&G uses design thinking to come up with new products to solve problems, like how to clean carpets. Microsoft uses design thinking to explore where technology will go in the future, especially as it relates to the Windows computing platform. JP Morgan uses design thinking to come up with financial solutions for clients with 401(K) accounts. Kraft uses design thinking to improve the supply chain and boost overall business value.

Anyway, there's not a full transcript of the presentation available, but here's a brief blurb about IDEO's "design thinking" philosophy from the MIT World website:

"Not so long ago, designers belonged to a “priesthood.” Given an assignment, a designer would disappear into a back room, “bring the result out under a black sheet and present it to the client.” Brown and his colleagues at IDEO, the company that brought us the first Apple Macintosh mouse, couldn’t have traveled farther from this notion.

At IDEO, a “design thinker” must not only be intensely collaborative, but “empathic, as well as have a craft to making things real in the world.” Since design flavors virtually all of our experiences, from products to services to spaces, a design thinker must explore a “landscape of innovation” that has to do with people, their needs, technology and business. Brown dips into three central “buckets” in the process of creating a new design: inspiration, ideation and implementation.

Design thinkers must set out like anthropologists or psychologists, investigating how people experience the world emotionally and cognitively. While designing a new hospital, IDEO staff stretched out on a gurney to see what the emergency room experience felt like. “You see 20 minutes of ceiling tiles,” says Brown, and realize the “most important thing is telling people what’s going on.” In a completely different venue, IDEO visited a NASCAR pit crew to come up with a more effective design for operating theaters.

After inspiration comes “building to think:” often a hundred prototypes created quickly, both to test the design and to create stakeholders in the process. Says Brown, “So many good ideas fail to make it out to market because they couldn’t navigate through the system.” IDEO counts on storytelling to develop and express its ideas, and to buy key players into the concept. Finally, IDEO relies on constantly refreshing its sources of inspiration by bringing in bold thinkers to campus, and increasingly, focusing on socially oriented design problems.

Tags: IDEO innovation design

[image: Tim Brown of IDEO]

Posted by dominic at June 2, 2006 11:57 AM | Recommend this! | +dlc | +dig

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The Business Innovation Insider features an excerpt from a talk by IDEO’s Tim Brown. When I saw Tim on stage at the 2004 CHI, I was deeply impressed - his enthusiasm and presence made his talk a highly memorizable experience. And, obviously, so was Hasso Plattner when he first met the IDEO people and later decided to put $35m into Stanford’s D.School. His talk can be viewed on the MIT World website.

According to Brown, design is everywhere around us - on the covers of business magazines, as part of consumer experiences at companies like Nike and Apple, and increasingly mentioned by Fortune 500 executives as an important way to grow a business. For many companies, design thinking is a way to create the future.

And right they are. Innovation doesn’t happen by accident. Someone must drive it.

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