An Introduction to Design Thinking for Innovation

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that uses logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning to explore possibilities and create desired outcomes that benefit the end user. It involves both analysis and imagination and seeks to build ideas up, unlike critical thinking, which breaks them down. Design thinking informs human-centered innovation, which starts with understanding customers' unmet or unarticulated needs. The focus of innovation has shifted from engineering to design and from product-centric to customer-centric, providing a fast-acting learning cycle. The five phases of design thinking - empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test - are not always sequential. Design thinking can be applied to services and designing new business models. The primary use of design thinking to date has been in developing incremental innovation or help resolve specific problems or challenges. However, it has limitations applied to innovation work, such as the requirement for problem definition and the potential unintended consequences with complex problems. For effective implementation, design thinking needs to become a potential organization capability building methodology.