“The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes”- Marcel Proust

Design Thinking is said to be the next competitive advantage.IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm, is a perfect example of this. Using its creative design thinking they managed to make many companies, such as Apple, RIM (Research In Motion) and Procter & Gamble, stand out from the crowd. So what is design thinking?  Tim Brown, the CEO and President of IDEO, gives the following definition: “Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity”. On the basis of his rich experience as industrial designer and advisor of senior executives and boards of Fortune 100 companies, in the Winter 2010 Stanford Social Innovation Review he suggests three aspects, or spaces which can be applied as solid basis of your design thinking process: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. He does not call them steps because they might not be sequential and project teams might go through these aspects, or spaces more than once. Let’s go through the three “Is” that Brown suggests as solid basis of design thinking process:

1. Inspiration

Brown believes that the inspiration space is all about problem or opportunity recognition. And here the design process actually starts. Looking at extreme cases might stimulate inspiration. Dario Buzzini, design director at IDEO, says: “We look for the extreme users, not because we target them, but because you can see interesting patterns that can inspire us”. Another way of getting inspiration is looking for analogous experiences. Buzzini says that IDEO used a Formula 1 racing team as a source of inspiration. “When you look at all the persons involved in, for example changing the tires during pit stop in a F1 race, and do it in a few seconds, you understand that they know exactly what they are doing. That’s probably the best example of team efficiency”, says Buzzini. Asking questions is another useful technique to get inspiration. As Warren Berger writes for Harvard Business Review: “If you spend any time around designers, you quickly discover this about them: They ask, and raise, a lot of questions. Often this is the starting point in the design process, and it can have a profound influence on everything that follows”. A very helpful technique for questions or inspiration generation is situation observation. Brown recommends “designers to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of smallholder farmers, schoolchildren, and community health workers as they improvise their way through their daily lives. Through “homestays” and shadowing locals at their jobs and in their homes, design thinkers become embedded in the lives of the people they are designing for”. David Kelley, founder and chairman of IDEO, and Tom Kelley, IDEO’s general manager, support this belief as well and claim that observing customers in their environments is as important as talking to them. Moreover, sometimes customers are not aware of the problems they might have while working or just being in their environment, therefore observation of their behavior is a better design thinking process technique. An example they share is the toothbrush development for kids under 5. For a long time companies were developing small and thin toothbrushes under assumptions that kids have smaller hands. However after observing kids’ behavior, IDEO designers figured out that kids actually need bigger and thicker toothbrushes – a fact that was not initially intuitive.

2. Ideation

At this point designers should go through “a process of synthesis in which they distill what they saw and heard into insights that can lead to solutions or opportunities for change”, writes Brown. At this moment of idea generation, divergence is of an essential importance. In other words jumping from one idea to another and getting out ideas from people with diverse educational and experience background is of critical importance. As Linus Pauling, scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner put it, “To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas.”  To achieve that Brown believes you need “T – shaped” persons who have strengths in two dimensions: on the vertical axis every member must possess skills that allow them to make tangible contributions to the final outcome, and the second dimension is actually what makes the design thinker – empathy for people and disciplines beyond one’s own.  Empathy “tends to be expressed as openness, curiosity, optimism, a tendency toward learning through doing, and experimentation”, writes Brown. He gives InnoCentive as a good example of how design thinking can lead to hundreds of ideas. He says: “InnoCentive has created a Web site that allows  people to post solutions to challenges that are defined by InnoCentive members, a mix of nonprofits and companies. More than 175,000 people—including scientists, engineers, and designers from around  the world—have posted  solutions”.

3. Implementation 

This is the last aspect of design thinking process when you should switch from divergent to convergent thinking. At this point the best generated ideas during the ideation phase are turned into concrete action plan. The core of this phase is prototyping or turning ideas into actual products which are then tested and refined. An essential aspect of the whole prototype-testing process is iteration. David Kelley makes a good point in this context by saying that if you show your ideas in prototype form then people will immediately tell you what is wrong and not what is right. Therefore this feedback is vital and you should apply it in building your final product. Moreover you repeat the “enlighten and trial error process” until you realize you developed a product that is delighting the people that you are making it for.

Final thoughts on Design Thinking as it relates to entrepreneurs and startups:

“Design experiences not just products.” Tom Kelley 

Life is but a sum of experiences. When designing a product, think of the experiences this product should enable. By creating an ‘experience’, rather than a product, you will effectively be tapping into the very essence of what makes us human. A great example here would be Apple’s iPhone: from the very start there was very little mention of the specifications of the iPhone, instead the product enabled and facilitated experiences. This approach allowed Apple not only to create an experience-centric product, but also to market it through those experiences. See this, this, and this video.

“Treat life as an experiment.” Tom Kelley 

This is related to willing to take risks and being prepared to fail. The same as experiments, startups are not always successful. Sometimes you have to test thousands of ideas before it works. The same logic applies from WD-40 oil (they tested 39 formulas before they found the one, the 40th, which worked)  and vacuum guru James Dyson (he developed 5128 prototypes before he had something to sell) who tested tons of ideas before developing the right product to Apple’s ideas failure.

“Think like a traveler.” Tom Kelley 

When you travel and visit new places, your bran is usually highly alert which means you are capable of spotting details you would not spot in your hometown or country. The art of innovation is being able to look at the common and everyday things from a different perspective. Thus try to be alert and observe the situation with different eyes because that will give power to your startup. IDEO is an example of a company which applies this belief in its business practices.  

“Follow your passion and you will never go wrong.” David Kelley 

Sometimes you don’t necessarily have to have a revolutionary product to make a difference. Instead you have to love and believe in that product It’s all about passion. Richard Branson, the head of Virgin Group, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, or Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell are living examples of people who made a difference in the business world with the passion they have towards life and success.

“Truly innovative ideas challenge the status quo and stand out from the crowd—they’re creatively disruptive. They provide a wholly new solution to  a problem many people didn’t know they had.” Tim Brown 

Examples of this are the iPad or the Amazon Kindle. They created and defined completely new categories of devices which changed users’ needs and habits in way users did not anticipate.

“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that ain’t so” – Mark Twain