Besides the good acceptance of design thinking skills for human-centric Innovation, why is a record number of Startups failing? Why are innovators suffering from the burn of the failure of more than 80 percent of innovations in ferreting out profitable revenue? Does it mean that innovators are not familiar with design thinking skills? To address these problems, is design thinking education good enough? In basic principles, designing thinking is neither new nor complex. Human beings intuitively follow design thinking. They have been using it in clarifying requirements and designing artifacts such as buildings, machines, and many more. For sure, design thinking encompasses many useful processes such as context analysis, problem finding, ideating, and creative thinking. It also includes sketching, drawing, modeling, prototyping, testing, and evaluating.
Design thinking skills, promoted by Stanford University’s d.School, is a five-stage process: (i) defining the problem, (ii) needfinding and benchmarking, (iii) ideating, (iv) prototyping, and (v) testing. Often, the design innovation process starts with the inspiration phase. Understanding the problem or the opportunity may work as a trigger signal. To promote it, MIT has developed a certificate course with ten modules. The core focus of design thinking is to harness empathy and creativity to generate ideas for new products in addressing customers’ untold requirements through appropriate ideas. But, in the absence of evolution, they remain stunted. The success of Wealth creation out of innovation depends on winning the global race. Hence, designing thinking skills promoted by Stanford University and MIT are not good enough for empowering innovators to win the innovation race.
Despite initial success, design thinking has a natural tendency of misguiding innovators:
The focus of design thinking has been on developing products, whether goods or services, from scratch to meet customer requirements. It attempts to master a systematic approach for developing perfect products with one shot. Well, this approach is useful in developing a very well-suited customized solution. But it does not separate customized solutions from the innovation which needs to win the competitive race through evolution. For winning the race, innovations should keep evolving. But how innovators will keep generating a Flow of Ideas in a systematic manner to win the race does not get noticed in designing thinking skills.
The available design thinking approach gives the impression that innovators need to focus on innovating new products every time. But what thinking process should guide incremental advancement, sustaining innovation, reinvention, and reinnovation? Interestingly, all great product products emerge in primitive form with many imperfections. How to systematically keep reducing those imperfections through successive releases is at the core of creating innovation success. The innovation success distills not from a series of new products. Instead, it evolves along with the evolution of products and services. Hence, evolution-centric thinking should get the focus on creating innovation success.
Human-centric innovation—are user interfaces good enough?
Of course, design thinking skills focus on human-centric design. But is the user interface the only area we should focus on making a product more human-centric. What about the ideas of changing the technology core for reducing energy wastage? Or, what about adding features for increasing the positive externality effects? Furthermore, modification or addition of features of existing products also makes products more human-centric in performing jobs more easily.
For example, Japanese Nichia has made light bulbs more human-centric by changing the energy-wasting filament with LED chips. Similarly, innovators are after electric vehicles and renewable energy to reduce pollution and climate change effects. Although these and many other innovations do not focus on the user interface, are they not addressing human-centric issues?
Wealth creates out of the evolution of innovation:
As mentioned, all great products begin the journey in a primitive form. Despite having an initial positive impression, we keep finding limitations in them. Innovators keep evolving them through the addition and enhancement of features over decades and centuries. Through this evolution, innovations keep diffusing deeper in society, creating increasing wealth. For example, the initial computer was a huge energy-hungry machine. The exploitation of its latent potential is out of evolution. Like the computer, many other great innovations have been progressively creating additional wealth out of evolution.
Similarly, in the early days, airplanes’ safety and comfort records were very poor. Hence, in the early days, the wealth creation capability of innovative products is very limited. Products keep getting more human-centric through evolution. Sometimes, this evolution leads to recreation forming a new wave, creating creative and Disruptive innovation effects. It happens to be that these core issues of innovation dynamics are missing in design thinking skills.
Scarcity of ideas for applying design thinking skills:
One of the key steps of design thinking skills is creativity. But how will you generate ideas? Will you rely on creative genius? Or, will you engage in brainstorming? Of course, those approaches generate ideas. Unfortunately, we run the risk of generating great accidental ideas and many irreverent ones. But how will we screen out useful ones from the rest? Well, rapid prototyping is not always useful.
Furthermore, how will you test ideas for which the knowledge is not available yet? Besides, despite the usefulness in UX design, the prototyping approach is not useful either in many cases. Furthermore, for creating innovation successes in the competition race, ideas should play a strategic role in sustaining innovation, reinvention, creative destruction, and disruptive innovations. Hence, in addition to empathy, we need to have strategic thinking and access to the flow of knowledge for systematically creating ideas that succeed in winning the global race.
Linking design thinking skills with strategy and scientific discoveries and technology possibilities:
Of course, design thinking has strong merit in empathetically feeling customers’ untold pains and generating ideas. But that is not sufficient in winning an innovation race. Those ideas should be linked with innovation strategy. In many cases, ideas of developing inferior products could be strategically more useful than the ones preferred by existing customers. For example, Sony’s idea of the Transistor radio and digital camera and Tesla’s idea of electric vehicles were not preferred by customers at the beginning. But those companies created success by evolving them as Creative waves of destruction. In certain cases, those creative waves succeed in causing a disruptive effect on opponents.
Furthermore, how will we systematically get ideas? In addition, empathy, Passion for Perfection, and creativity, we need a flow of ideas. For example, in the absence of scientific discovery, no amount of empathy, passion for perfection, brainstorming, or creativity was good enough to have perfect white LED light bulbs. Similarly, without the advancement of underlying silicon chips, no amount of Steve Jobs’ empathy was good enough to offer affordable, seamless graphical and multi-touch user interfaces. Hence, innovators must link design thinking skills with winning strategy and flow of knowledge. In its absence, innovators run the risk of getting misguided out of following design thinking as a core innovation approach. As opposed to systematically evolving a selected few, they may end up innovating a series of them that remain stunted.
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