The design thinking hype

In management science, design thinking became the craze after Tim Brown, chair and co-CEO of the design company IDEO, described in a Harvard Business Review article how IDEO supports innovation projects for their clients (Brown, 2008). He described a cycle through three tasks.

In the Inspiration task, the innovation team investigates the problem, stakeholders, experiences, desires, goals and constraints that motivate an innovation. In the Ideation task, the team formulates possible solutions and tests them in prototypes in rapid iterations. These two tasks correspond to our design cycle.

In the Implementation task, the innovation team builds the solution, makes the business case, and helps marketing build a communication strategy. In our approach this is part of a larger cycle, the engineering, cycle, that includes the design cycle.

The IDEO process is firmly customer oriented. Our process is firmly anchored in the identification of customer needs. Our goal is to create a business model for a network of actors that sustainably meets customer needs.