Ashwin Damera
Vishal Sikka of Infosys, Nisa Godrej of Godrej Industries, Kishore Biyani of Future Group and Harsh Mariwala of Marico have committed to design thinking in their organisations. Infosys, in fact has trained about one lakh employees on design thinking in 2016 as the firm looks to ramp up revenues from new technology areas. Internationally, companies such as Apple, Virgin Atlantic, Toyota, and many others have been vocal about how they are able to innovate continuously due to the culture of design thinking.
Corporate leaders are today using design thinking as a strategic business tool for accelerated growth through a radical change in the way these organizations innovate.
All this leads to the question: what is design thinking?
Design thinking is a creative and systematic approach to problem-solving by placing the user at the centre of the experience. It is enabling organisations of all sizes to ideate better, develop new approaches to innovation, weave insights and concepts together, and ultimately helping them meet their customers’ needs more effectively. Folks at IDEO, one of the most innovative and award-winning design firms in the world, strategically put users at the core of everything they do—a process they refer to as human-centered design.
A design thinking course teaches participants to understand the design thinking process, identify and assess customer opportunities, generate and evaluate new product and service concepts, design services and customer experiences, design for environmental sustainability, and evaluate product development economics.
Unlike many other professionals, designers are trained to think about a number of different constraints at once - technical (what is feasible), human (what is desirable) and financial (what is viable). Design thinking is particularly useful for resolving extremely complex issues where many stakeholders need to be satisfied
The basics of the design thinking methodology can be broken down into five steps, according to a primer by designers at Stanford University’s d. school:
Empathise—Observe the customer’s needs and motivations.
Define—Define the problem that you want to solve.
Ideate—Come up with a variety of solutions, without judging which are good or bad.
Prototype—Make models of the most promising possibilities.
Test—Test the models.
While B-schools teach students to base their decisions on market research and data, design thinking uses real-life interactions and problems to work with.
Some examples that really demonstrate the power of design thinking are the transformation of Airbnb from a failing startup to a billion dollar business; Toyota using design thinking to speed up and improve customer service responses in its California centre; Toshiba converted floppy disk manufacturing factories into vegetable farms, growing lettuce, spinach, and other green leafy vegetables etc.
Design thinking is and will continue to become more valuable in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. It will be in our best interest to be trained in this discipline.
The writer is Executive Director, Emeritus Institute of Management
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