Strategy + Design Thinking = Stakeholder-Centric Design
OVER THE PAST 15 YEARS, design thinking has had an explosive impact on innovation and commercialization, especially within established firms. The Rotman School’s former Dean, Roger Martin, has contributed mightily to these advances, notably through his book, The Design of Business. Other authors, including David Kelley, founder of IDEO, have developed and popularized the approach both in principle and in practice.
The methods and approaches of this discipline are varied, yet they generally boil down to unleashing creativity through an iterative series of steps:
1. In a typical design-thinking approach, practitioners get out of the organization and into the field to better understand their customers, employing ethnographic research techniques such as user observation and open-ended inquiry to identify unmet needs.2. Armed with this primary research data, they then synthesize different ‘problem frames’.3. A cross-disciplinary team then brainstorms possible solutions based on the framing in Step 2.4. The team then prototypes the best possibilities into tangible concepts. These may take5. The end products of Step 4 are then tested with actual potential users. Their feedback is used to iterate on the idea — and sometimes, to re-frame the problem to be solved.
