Innovation and Design Thinking - Is It A Mindset, Process or Profession?

Continuing on this topic. Let's start with some key findings from a recent McKinsey survey.  According to the survey, a company’s main challenge with innovation today is finding enough talented people. In the survey, top managers agree that identifying the right people and aligning them for innovation is their single-greatest struggle and that the most important drivers of innovation are the organization’s culture and people. The survey further suggests, however, that companies discourage talented staff from pursuing innovation by offering limited incentives, being risk averse, and having no plan for dealing with failure.

The findings shows that executives have very different perceptions of the struggles related to finding and aligning their people. In short, it is still a lack of common understanding despite its importance. Innovation is not in the core curriculum of MBA schools. Another interesting point is 40% of top managers say that they do not have enough of the right kind of employees. Among respondents who do say enough people are available, however, nearly 50% say the right employees are in place, motivated, and protected by senior leadership, and only 22% say the organization’s culture inhibits them from making progress. The question that immediately comes to my mind when they say they do not have enough of the right kind of employees, I wonder if they have a definition of what are the "right" kind of employees. That would be an interesting question to add to the survey. I don’t think you will get answers such as “we need designers in the executive suites or we need more senior executives with design thinking”.

People who are trained in various disciplines of design are particularly good at using their instincts more than other individuals. Any innovation strategist must develop a keen interest in what works in marketplaces and what are the desirability factor as well as usability factor. Designers have an advantage and a key role to play in this innovation movement and that’s why I was saying MFA is the new MBA. The innovation field per se needs to use many different forms of design, crossover, jammed and integrated, to get beyond some threshold level of activity--enough to get commercially produced and, to be strategic. The great news for designers about the rise of a corporate interest in innovation is that it recognizes, more than ever before, the strategic contribution of "design thinking" to product, service, information, and corporate level bsuiness strategy. I think this as a long term trend that will likely to persist for at least another decade. I am not saying any designer should be given the decision making power for important business projects. I think we are talking about new capability. I don’t think we can simply put designers together with spreadsheet crawlers and expect innovation will follow. Design thinking is not only about design. It is about applying their mental models, languages and tools to complex business decision making. I'd like to see practitioners, design schools, business schools and engineering schools coming together to create broad new capabilities and professionalism that will actually meet the underlying need for objects, places, human-centered concepts, and distinctive experiences that human beings crave--and enterprises must increasingly learn to deliver to thrive and prosper.

Photo: Stanford Design School - Masters Project

My friend Bob Jacobson (A planner and technologist, science writer, consultant, a Fulbright scholar and he edited Information Design with MIT Press and is now working on a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences www.corante.com) believes that my notion of "engineering desire" is a bridge too far.  According to Bob," Knowing as little as we do about desire, presuming to be able to engineer it may lead marketers in pursuit of a Holy Grail -- or possibly, a wild goose chase."

I think this point is somewhat valid. But we need to look at markeitng today which is at its mid-life crisis and in the middle of a complete transformation. Many consumers now experience consumption as part of the journey towards personal development, achievement and self-creation. Marketing is evolving away from a top-down supply-chain-centric approach towards one that provides or facilitates innovations for new ideas and consumer meanings. The co-creation of ‘desirable’ experiences with consumers has become the basis for value and is experiencial in nature. This, in fact, challenges the convention view of product-centric innovation.

Photo: Parson Sustainable Design Project

Let me post a few questions here. Is design-driven innovation a new profession, or is it a new level of collaboration between existing professions (design, engineering and business)? It's interesting for us to think a little ahead. Industrial design wasn't always a profession - it was packaging for engineering ideas. Then it slowly evolves into a specialist domain. Interface design was an application of psychology. Then there are Interactive design and Service design. Will innovation be part of the schools of business? Or schools of design? Or schools of anthropology? Or school of engineering? Can the discipline be formed without the support of the educational system or professional associations? Should innovation be implemented as a mind-set, a process, or a deliverable?  Tell me what you think.

Photo: Cup holder designed by Maya Goldberg (a recent graduate of the St Martin's College of Art and Design, London)

Comments

[Philippe]

Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week got this. He called it the "Empathy Economy" where
"Design thinking" can create rewarding experiences for consumers -- the key to earnings growth and an edge that outsourcing can't beat . You can't Six Sigma your way to high-impact innovation, but you can design your company to generate products and services that provide great consumer experiences, top-line revenue growth, and fat profit margins. You and him are on the same page.

[Flavio Azevedo]

Companies were put together like machines.

Now they will have to be created as living organisms.

Down: Math, Physics, Chemestry.

Up: Biology, Psychology, Art.

The designer is the mass-produced artist, after all.

I think we will see "innovation design" in colleges in less than a decade.

The world needs a new software to run its upgraded hardware.

[George]

I like what Falvio is saying. Business need a major software upgrade. Colleges too. Someone needs to create a beta version first.

[André Galhardo]

"Design is art people use"

I like that definition.

If top managers have a definition of what are the "right" kind of employees?

Yes, absolutely.

And, of course, we don't like that... but I think we tend to act just like them when we look for a new member for our teams.

It's impossible to see how people we don't know will fit and we prefer to avoid the different.

The same with MBAs.

I like the HBS Case Method and the idea of bringing as many diverse point of views as possible to analyse a Case Study - it can be exciting.

But Business Schools are failing to bring "new" diversity to their campuses.

Maybe one answer could be creating a new "basic clicle" for B and D Schools, blending design, art, business and innovation.

[Pete Colman]

Really enjoying these posts on what I think is the most interesting of business topics.

To your question Idris “Innovation and Design Thinking - Is It A Mindset, Process or Profession?”

I’d treat the two related ideas (Innovation and Design Thinking) slightly differently.

For innovation: I think to it depends on your favoured definition. In a business context, mine is ‘the successful exploitation of new ideas’. Whilst I believe the creativity to generate a ‘new idea’ is a combination of mindset and skill/experience, the ‘successful exploitation’ still requires management / measurement and so generally is more process-like.

However, in certain companies it is effectively the mission statement (eg 3M). The advantage of this is that it means it is the responsibility of everyone in the company rather than it being just the focus of a few bright employees at corporate HQ (one of the disadvantages of the Profession approach to Innovation).

For design thinking: its interdisciplinary nature makes me think this is currently more of a Mindset. For a company to be willing to approach a problem with a diverse team, from a customer’s perspective without believing it knows the answer already and to be humble enough to admit that it doesn’t understand their needs as well as it could takes guts. Only a proportion of company cultures will currently allow this. However, with closer collaboration between b&d schools, hopefully this proportion will increase over time.

A question I have is – is the Innovation agenda a fad or trend? If the US economy continues to struggle/goes into recession, will the innovation agenda be used to stimulate new growth or will it be sidelined by cost-cutting and outsourcing.

[Morgan Gerard]

The dice have already been thrown in the design (and innovation as a multi-disciplinary process) game in a number of anthropology departments in universities around the world. Rather than focusing their students on the more traditional field studies that ethnographies in the bush have been about for the last century, the exotic others have become users, experiencers, urban dwellers, energy consumers and the like. There's some exciting stuff out there on the connects between anthro and design, something I wish I could tap into directly by beaming back in time to start that schooling all over again.

[Sunnil K]

Multi-disciplinary is the future of any career success. School can only help so much as it takes forever for them to change. I would jump on a Anthropology and Design Program anyime. Or a Technology and Anthropology Program etc. I hope these options will be available for younger folks in 5-10 years. Idris, I just like the way you speak to how design can mix with other business discipline and amazing things can happen. Looking forward to read more here.

[christian briggs]

Fantastic discussion here, folks. Here at the Indiana University School of Informatics, our HCI program was from the outset termed HCI/d (the "d" is for design), and we've seen some incredible value in approaching HCI with a new mind-set, rather than just a process or a deliverable. In other words, we've made explicit the idea that "Design" (once defined by my advisor Erik Stolterman as "strategic intent in the ongoing genesis of the real world"(paraphrased)) ALWAYS occurs in any production of an artifact used between humans and computers, whether or not we realize it. We've therefore made design theory (not just HCI theory) part of our curriculum and research, so that we can critically reflect on the design decisions that go into the things and processes that we generate.

I don't think i'll be going against the current bloggeist here to say that business ALREADY is a design profession, albeit one with a vestigial design sensibility. The same can be said for government, medicine, etc etc. If we take for a moment that design is "strategic intent in the ongoing genesis of the real world," then we might say that every human endeavor that intends to change the world in some way ought to seek to enable its participants to critically examine the ways in which it intends to do so.

@Flavio: I admire and covet your skill for brevity.

[T Stewart]

Lot of great ideas and discussions here in this blog. Here at IDEO, we believe that deisgn needs a language, a process and a framework in order to design. We stress that experience is key success factor: learn from all the projects we've worked on, distil the knowledge and apply it to our future projects.

[Chris Hughes]

Great discussion! I am a first year MFA student in a brand new program called “Design Thinking and Leadership” at Indiana University. Not sure if it’s the newness of the program, but at times I feel like an explorer going to where few if any has gone before with an incomplete map. My mentor/teacher/director would say its embracing ambiguity and constant change. To answer one question my program is at the Herron School of Art and Design. I believe innovation can be taught at any of the schools mentioned and at a design school because of its traditional roots can give a good dosage of creativity and visual thinking. I look forward to collaborating with those from different disciples and seeing what strengths and unique perspectives their program provides.

[Yves B]

Like Chris, I am a MFA student at Parson and I fully share with him that design school and collaborate with other disciplines and combine the perpsectives of both. It is just not happening fast enough.