Innovation & Design Thinking

INNOVATION & DESIGN THINKING

Why Design Thinking?

Thinking like a designer can certainly transform the way companies develop products/services, strategies, and processes.

If companies can bring together what is most desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and also economically viable, they can certainly transform their businesses.

This also gives an opportunity to people who are not trained as designers to utilize creative tools to tackle a range of challenges.

Design Thinking Approach

Empathize: Understand your users as clearly as possible and empathize with them.

Define: Clearly define the problem that needs to be sorted and bring out a lot of possible solutions.

Ideate: Channel your focus on the final outcomes, not the present constraints.

Prototype: Use prototypes for exploring possible solutions.

Test: Test your solutions, reflect on the results, improvise the solution, and repeat the process.
(Recently, we had Mr. Ashish Krishna (Head of Design – Prysm) addressing our interns about the same Design Thinking Approach)

Facts that prove the importance of having a Design Thinking Approach

The chart displayed below clearly indicates that the design-centric companies have outperformed the S&P 500 by a massive 211%.

Source: The Design Management Institute

Some years ago, Walmart had revamped its e-commerce experience, and as a result, the unique visitors to its website increased by a whopping 200%. Similarly, When BOA (Bank of America) undertook a user-centered design of its process for the account registrations, the online banking traffic shot up by 45%.

In a design-driven culture, firms are not afraid to launch a product that is not totally perfect, which means, going to market with an MVP (minimally viable product), learn from the customer feedback, incorporate the same, and then build and release the next version of the product.

A classic example of this is Instagram, which launched a product, learning which features were most popular, and then re-launching a new version. As a result, there were 100,000 downloads in less than a week.

ROI from Design

Let’s take a look at some examples of how design impacted the ROI of companies.

The Nike – Swoosh, which is one of the most popular logos across the globe, managed to sell billions of dollars of merchandise through the years. The icon was designed in the year 1971 and at that time the cost was only $35. However, after almost 47 years, that $35 logo evolved into a brand, which Forbes recently estimated to be worth over $15 billion.

Some years back the very popular ESPN.com received a lot of feedback from users for their cluttered and hard to navigate homepage. The company went ahead and redesigned their website, and as a result, the redesign garnered a 35% increase in their site revenues.

Some Benefits of having a Design Thinking Approach

Helps in tackling creative challenges: Design thinking gives you an opportunity to take a look at problems from a completely different perspective. The process of design thinking allows you to look at an existing issue in a company using creativity.

The entire process will involve some serious brainstorming and the formulation of fresh ideas, which can expand the learner’s knowledge. By putting design thinking approach to use, professionals are able to collaborate with one another to get feedback, which thereby helps in creating an invaluable experience to end clients.

Helps in effectively meeting client requirements: As design thinking involves prototyping, all the products at the MVP stage will go through multiple rounds of testing and customer feedback for assured quality.

With a proper design thinking approach in place, you will most likely meet the client expectations as your clients are directly involved in the design and development process.

Expand your knowledge with design thinking: The design process goes through multiple evaluations. The process does not stop even after the deliverable is complete.

Companies continue to measure the results based on the feedback received and ensure that the customer is having the best experience using the product.

By involving oneself in such a process, the design thinkers constantly improve their understanding of their customers, and as a result, they will be able to figure out certain aspects such as what tools should be used, how to close the weak gaps in the deliverable and so on.

Conclusion

If we take a closer look at a business, we will come to a realization that the lines between product/services and user environments are blurring. If companies can bring out an integrated customer experience, it will open up opportunities to build new businesses.

Design thinking is not just a trend that will fade away in a month. It is definitely gaining some serious traction, not just in product companies, but also in other fields such as education and science.

Why Design Thinking Works

While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way.

Occasionally, a new way of organizing work leads to extraordinary improvements. Total quality management did that in manufacturing in the 1980s by combining a set of tools—kanban cards, quality circles, and so on—with the insight that people on the shop floor could do much higher level work than they usually were asked to. That blend of tools and insight, applied to a work process, can be thought of as a social technology.

In a recent seven-year study in which I looked in depth at 50 projects from a range of sectors, including business, health care, and social services, I have seen that another social technology, design thinking, has the potential to do for innovation exactly what TQM did for manufacturing: unleash people’s full creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes. By now most executives have at least heard about design thinking’s tools—ethnographic research, an emphasis on reframing problems and experimentation, the use of diverse teams, and so on—if not tried them. But what people may not understand is the subtler way that design thinking gets around the human biases (for example, rootedness in the status quo) or attachments to specific behavioral norms (“That’s how we do things here”) that time and again block the exercise of imagination.

In this article I’ll explore a variety of human tendencies that get in the way of innovation and describe how design thinking’s tools and clear process steps help teams break free of them. Let’s begin by looking at what organizations need from innovation—and at why their efforts to obtain it often fall short.

The Challenges of Innovation

To be successful, an innovation process must deliver three things: superior solutions, lower risks and costs of change, and employee buy-in. Over the years businesspeople have developed useful tactics for achieving those outcomes. But when trying to apply them, organizations frequently encounter new obstacles and trade-offs.

Superior solutions.

Defining problems in obvious, conventional ways, not surprisingly, often leads to obvious, conventional solutions. Asking a more interesting question can help teams discover more-original ideas. The risk is that some teams may get indefinitely hung up exploring a problem, while action-oriented managers may be too impatient to take the time to figure out what question they should be asking.

It’s also widely accepted that solutions are much better when they incorporate user-driven criteria. Market research can help companies understand those criteria, but the hurdle here is that it’s hard for customers to know they want something that doesn’t yet exist.

Finally, bringing diverse voices into the process is also known to improve solutions. This can be difficult to manage, however, if conversations among people with opposing views deteriorate into divisive debates.

Lower risks and costs.

Uncertainty is unavoidable in innovation. That’s why innovators often build a portfolio of options. The trade-off is that too many ideas dilute focus and resources. To manage this tension, innovators must be willing to let go of bad ideas—to “call the baby ugly,” as a manager in one of my studies described it. Unfortunately, people often find it easier to kill the creative (and arguably riskier) ideas than to kill the incremental ones.

Employee buy-in.

An innovation won’t succeed unless a company’s employees get behind it. The surest route to winning their support is to involve them in the process of generating ideas. The danger is that the involvement of many people with different perspectives will create chaos and incoherence.

Underlying the trade-offs associated with achieving these outcomes is a more fundamental tension. In a stable environment, efficiency is achieved by driving variation out of the organization. But in an unstable world, variation becomes the organization’s friend, because it opens new paths to success. However, who can blame leaders who must meet quarterly targets for doubling down on efficiency, rationality, and centralized control?

To manage all the trade-offs, organizations need a social technology that addresses these behavioral obstacles as well as the counterproductive biases of human beings. And as I’ll explain next, design thinking fits that bill.

The Beauty of Structure

Experienced designers often complain that design thinking is too structured and linear. And for them, that’s certainly true. But managers on innovation teams generally are not designers and also aren’t used to doing face-to-face research with customers, getting deeply immersed in their perspectives, co-creating with stakeholders, and designing and executing experiments. Structure and linearity help managers try and adjust to these new behaviors.

As Kaaren Hanson, formerly the head of design innovation at Intuit and now Facebook’s design product director, has explained: “Anytime you’re trying to change people’s behavior, you need to start them off with a lot of structure, so they don’t have to think. A lot of what we do is habit, and it’s hard to change those habits, but having very clear guardrails can help us.”

Organized processes keep people on track and curb the tendency to spend too long exploring a problem or to impatiently skip ahead. They also instill confidence. Most humans are driven by a fear of mistakes, so they focus more on preventing errors than on seizing opportunities. They opt for inaction rather than action when a choice risks failure. But there is no innovation without action—so psychological safety is essential. The physical props and highly formatted tools of design thinking deliver that sense of security, helping would-be innovators move more assuredly through the discovery of customer needs, idea generation, and idea testing.

In most organizations the application of design thinking involves seven activities. Each generates a clear output that the next activity converts to another output until the organization arrives at an implementable innovation. But at a deeper level, something else is happening—something that executives generally are not aware of. Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, each design-thinking activity also reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves in profound ways.

Customer Discovery

Many of the best-known methods of the design-thinking discovery process relate to identifying the “job to be done.” Adapted from the fields of ethnography and sociology, these methods concentrate on examining what makes for a meaningful customer journey rather than on the collection and analysis of data. This exploration entails three sets of activities:

Immersion.

Traditionally, customer research has been an impersonal exercise. An expert, who may well have preexisting theories about customer preferences, reviews feedback from focus groups, surveys, and, if available, data on current behavior, and draws inferences about needs. The better the data, the better the inferences. The trouble is, this grounds people in the already articulated needs that the data reflects. They see the data through the lens of their own biases. And they don’t recognize needs people have not expressed.

Shaping the Innovator's Journey

What makes design thinking a social technology is its ability to counteract the biases of innovators and change the way ...

Design thinking takes a different approach: Identify hidden needs by having the innovator live the customer’s experience. Consider what happened at the Kingwood Trust, a UK charity helping adults with autism and Asperger’s syndrome. One design team member, Katie Gaudion, got to know Pete, a nonverbal adult with autism. The first time she observed him at his home, she saw him engaged in seemingly damaging acts—like picking at a leather sofa and rubbing indents in a wall. She started by documenting Pete’s behavior and defined the problem as how to prevent such destructiveness.

But on her second visit to Pete’s home, she asked herself: What if Pete’s actions were motivated by something other than a destructive impulse? Putting her personal perspective aside, she mirrored his behavior and discovered how satisfying his activities actually felt. “Instead of a ruined sofa, I now perceived Pete’s sofa as an object wrapped in fabric that is fun to pick,” she explained. “Pressing my ear against the wall and feeling the vibrations of the music above, I felt a slight tickle in my ear whilst rubbing the smooth and beautiful indentation…So instead of a damaged wall, I perceived it as a pleasant and relaxing audio-tactile experience.”

Katie’s immersion in Pete’s world not only produced a deeper understanding of his challenges but called into question an unexamined bias about the residents, who had been perceived as disability sufferers that needed to be kept safe. Her experience caused her to ask herself another new question: Instead of designing just for residents’ disabilities and safety, how could the innovation team design for their strengths and pleasures? That led to the creation of living spaces, gardens, and new activities aimed at enabling people with autism to live fuller and more pleasurable lives.

Sense making.

Immersion in user experiences provides raw material for deeper insights. But finding patterns and making sense of the mass of qualitative data collected is a daunting challenge. Time and again, I have seen initial enthusiasm about the results of ethnographic tools fade as non designers become overwhelmed by the volume of information and the messiness of searching for deeper insights. It is here that the structure of design thinking really comes into its own.

One of the most effective ways to make sense of the knowledge generated by immersion is a design-thinking exercise called the Gallery Walk. In it the core innovation team selects the most important data gathered during the discovery process and writes it down on large posters. Often these posters showcase individuals who have been interviewed, complete with their photos and quotations capturing their perspectives. The posters are hung around a room, and key stakeholders are invited to tour this gallery and write down on Post-it notes the bits of data they consider essential to new designs. The stakeholders then form small teams, and in a carefully orchestrated process, their Post-it observations are shared, combined, and sorted by theme into clusters that the group mines for insights. This process overcomes the danger that innovators will be unduly influenced by their own biases and see only what they want to see, because it makes the people who were interviewed feel vivid and real to those browsing the gallery. It creates a common database and facilitates collaborators’ ability to interact, reach shared insights together, and challenge one another’s individual takeaways—another critical guard against biased interpretations.

Alignment.

The final stage in the discovery process is a series of workshops and seminar discussions that ask in some form the question, If anything were possible, what job would the design do well? The focus on possibilities, rather than on the constraints imposed by the status quo, helps diverse teams have more-collaborative and creative discussions about the design criteria, or the set of key features that an ideal innovation should have. Establishing a spirit of inquiry deepens dissatisfaction with the status quo and makes it easier for teams to reach consensus throughout the innovation process. And down the road, when the portfolio of ideas is winnowed, agreement on the design criteria will give novel ideas a fighting chance against safer incremental ones.

Consider what happened at Monash Health, an integrated hospital and health care system in Melbourne, Australia. Mental health clinicians there had long been concerned about the frequency of patient relapses—usually in the form of drug overdoses and suicide attempts—but consensus on how to address this problem eluded them. In an effort to get to the bottom of it, clinicians traced the experiences of specific patients through the treatment process. One patient, Tom, emerged as emblematic in their study. His experience included three face-to-face visits with different clinicians, 70 touchpoints, 13 different case managers, and 18 handoffs during the interval between his initial visit and his relapse.

The team members held a series of workshops in which they asked clinicians this question: Did Tom’s current care exemplify why they had entered health care? As people discussed their motivations for becoming doctors and nurses, they came to realize that improving Tom’s outcome might depend as much on their sense of duty to Tom himself as it did on their clinical activity. Everyone bought into this conclusion, which made designing a new treatment process—centered on the patient’s needs rather than perceived best practices—proceed smoothly and successfully. After its implementation, patient-relapse rates fell by 60%.

Idea Generation

Once they understand customers’ needs, innovators move on to identify and winnow down specific solutions that conform to the criteria they’ve identified.

Emergence.

The first step here is to set up a dialogue about potential solutions, carefully planning who will participate, what challenge they will be given, and how the conversation will be structured. After using the design criteria to do some individual brainstorming, participants gather to share ideas and build on them creatively—as opposed to simply negotiating compromises when differences arise.

When Children’s Health System of Texas, the sixth-largest pediatric medical center in the United States, identified the need for a new strategy, the organization, led by the vice president of population health, Peter Roberts, applied design thinking to reimagine its business model. During the discovery process, clinicians set aside their bias that what mattered most was medical intervention. They came to understand that intervention alone wouldn’t work if the local population in Dallas didn’t have the time or ability to seek out medical knowledge and didn’t have strong support networks—something few families in the area enjoyed. The clinicians also realized that the medical center couldn’t successfully address problems on its own; the community would need to be central to any solution. So Children’s Health invited its community partners to codesign a new wellness ecosystem whose boundaries (and resources) would stretch far beyond the medical center. Deciding to start small and tackle a single condition, the team gathered to create a new model for managing asthma.

The session brought together hospital administrators, physicians, nurses, social workers, parents of patients, and staff from Dallas’s school districts, housing authority, YMCA, and faith-based organizations. First, the core innovation team shared learning from the discovery process. Next, each attendee thought independently about the capabilities that his or her institution might contribute toward addressing the children’s problems, jotting down ideas on sticky notes. Then each attendee was invited to join a small group at one of five tables, where the participants shared individual ideas, grouped them into common themes, and envisioned what an ideal experience would look like for the young patients and their families.

Champions of change usually emerge from these kinds of conversations, which greatly improves the chances of successful implementation. (All too often, good ideas die on the vine in the absence of people with a personal commitment to making them happen.) At Children’s Health, the partners invited into the project galvanized the community to act and forged and maintained the relationships in their institutions required to realize the new vision. Housing authority representatives drove changes in housing codes, charging inspectors with incorporating children’s health issues (like the presence of mold) into their assessments. Local pediatricians adopted a set of standard asthma protocols, and parents of children with asthma took on a significant role as peer counselors providing intensive education to other families through home visits.

Articulation.

Typically, emergence activities generate a number of competing ideas, more or less attractive and more or less feasible. In the next step, articulation, innovators surface and question their implicit assumptions. Managers are often bad at this, because of many behavioral biases, such as overoptimism, confirmation bias, and fixation on first solutions. When assumptions aren’t challenged, discussions around what will or won’t work become deadlocked, with each person advocating from his or her own understanding of how the world works.

In contrast, design thinking frames the discussion as an inquiry into what would have to be true about the world for an idea to be feasible. (See “Management Is Much More Than a Science,” by Roger L. Martin and Tony Golsby-Smith, HBR, September–October 2017.) An example of this comes from the Ignite Accelerator program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the Whiteriver Indian reservation hospital in Arizona, a team led by Marliza Rivera, a young quality control officer, sought to reduce wait times in the hospital’s emergency room, which were sometimes as long as six hours.

The team’s initial concept, borrowed from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, was to install an electronic kiosk for check-in. As team members began to apply design thinking, however, they were asked to surface their assumptions about why the idea would work. It was only then that they realized that their patients, many of whom were elderly Apache speakers, were unlikely to be comfortable with computer technology. Approaches that worked in urban Baltimore would not work in White river, so this idea could be safely set aside.

At the end of the idea generation process, innovators will have a portfolio of well-thought-through, though possibly quite different, ideas. The assumptions underlying them will have been carefully vetted, and the conditions necessary for their success will be achievable. The ideas will also have the support of committed teams, who will be prepared to take on the responsibility of bringing them to market.

The Testing Experience

Companies often regard prototyping as a process of fine-tuning a product or service that has already largely been developed. But in design thinking, prototyping is carried out on far-from-finished products. It’s about users’ iterative experiences with a work in progress. This means that quite radical changes—including complete redesigns—can occur along the way.

Pre-experience.

Neuroscience research indicates that helping people “pre-experience” something novel—or to put it another way, imagine it incredibly vividly—results in more-accurate assessments of the novelty’s value. That’s why design thinking calls for the creation of basic, low-cost artifacts that will capture the essential features of the proposed user experience. These are not literal prototypes—and they are often much rougher than the “minimum viable products” that lean start-ups test with customers. But what these artifacts lose in fidelity, they gain in flexibility, because they can easily be altered in response to what’s learned by exposing users to them. And their incompleteness invites interaction.

Such artifacts can take many forms. The layout of a new medical office building at Kaiser Permanente, for example, was tested by hanging bedsheets from the ceiling to mark future walls. Nurses and physicians were invited to interact with staffers who were playing the role of patients and to suggest how spaces could be adjusted to better facilitate treatment. At Monash Health, a program called Monash Watch—aimed at using telemedicine to keep vulnerable populations healthy at home and reduce their hospitalization rates—used detailed storyboards to help hospital administrators and government policy makers envision this new approach in practice, without building a digital prototype.

Learning in action.

Real-world experiments are an essential way to assess new ideas and identify the changes needed to make them workable. But such tests offer another, less obvious kind of value: They help reduce employees’ and customers’ quite normal fear of change.

Consider an idea proposed by Don Campbell, a professor of medicine, and Keith Stockman, a manager of operations research at Monash Health. As part of Monash Watch, they suggested hiring laypeople to be “telecare” guides who would act as “professional neighbors,” keeping in frequent telephone contact with patients at high risk of multiple hospital admissions. Campbell and Stockman hypothesized that lower-wage laypeople who were carefully selected, trained in health literacy and empathy skills, and backed by a decision support system and professional coaches they could involve as needed could help keep the at-risk patients healthy at home.

Their proposal was met with skepticism. Many of their colleagues held a strong bias against letting anyone besides a health professional perform such a service for patients with complex issues, but using health professionals in the role would have been unaffordable. Rather than debating this point, however, the innovation team members acknowledged the concerns and engaged their colleagues in the codesign of an experiment testing that assumption. Three hundred patients later, the results were in: Overwhelmingly positive patient feedback and a demonstrated reduction in bed use and emergency room visits, corroborated by independent consultants, quelled the fears of the skeptics.

CONCLUSION

As we have seen, the structure of design thinking creates a natural flow from research to rollout. Immersion in the customer experience produces data, which is transformed into insights, which help teams agree on design criteria they use to brainstorm solutions. Assumptions about what’s critical to the success of those solutions are examined and then tested with rough prototypes that help teams further develop innovations and prepare them for real-world experiments.

Along the way, design-thinking processes counteract human biases that thwart creativity while addressing the challenges typically faced in reaching superior solutions, lowered costs and risks, and employee buy-in. Recognizing organizations as collections of human beings who are motivated by varying perspectives and emotions, design thinking emphasizes engagement, dialogue, and learning. By involving customers and other stakeholders in the definition of the problem and the development of solutions, design thinking garners a broad commitment to change. And by supplying a structure to the innovation process, design thinking helps innovators collaborate and agree on what is essential to the outcome at every phase. It does this not only by overcoming workplace politics but by shaping the experiences of the innovators, and of their key stakeholders and implementers, at every step. That is social technology at work.

The Importance of Innovation – What Does it Mean for Businesses and our Society?

According to McKinsey, 84% of executives say that their future success is dependent on innovation. Although innovation may sound like a buzzword for some, there are many reasons why companies put a lot of emphasis on it.

In addition to the fact that innovation allows organizations to stay relevant in the competitive market, it also plays an important role in economic growth. The ability to resolve critical problems depends on new innovations and especially developing countries need it more than ever.

We’ve written quite a few posts about innovation management and this time, we’ve decided to take a closer look at the reasons that make innovation important for an individual organization and the society at large.

What is innovation and why do we need it?

Innovation, by definition, is the introduction of something new. Without innovation, there isn’t anything new, and without anything new, there will be no progress. If an organization isn’t making any progress, it simply cannot stay relevant in the competitive market.

Because organizations are often working with other individual organizations, it can sometimes be challenging to understand the impacts of innovation on our society at large. There is, however, a lot more to innovation than just firms looking to achieve competitive advantage.

Innovation really is the core reason for modern existence. Although innovation can have some undesirable consequences, change is inevitable and in most cases, innovation creates positive change.

We've decided to look at the outcomes of innovation on macro and micro level:

Macro perspective: The role of innovation in our society

Over the last decades, innovation has become a significant way to combat critical social risks and threats.

For example, since the Industrial Revolution, energy-driven consumption of fossil fuels has led to a rapid increase in CO₂ emissions, disrupting the global carbon cycle and leading to a planetary warming impact.

Our society revolves around continuous economic growth, which mainly depends on population growth. The population is shrinking and ageing in the developed counties and is likely to do so in other parts of the world as well.

Innovation is important to the advancement of society as it solves these kinds of social problems and enhances society’s capacity to act.

It's responsible for resolving collective problems in a sustainable and efficient way, usually with new technology. These new technologies, products and services simultaneously meet a social need and lead to improved capabilities and better use of assets and resources.

In order to be able to solve these kinds of societal problems, private, public and non-profit sectors are involved.

The fundamental outcomes of innovation

Because innovation has an impact on so many different parts of our society, it would be almost impossible to go through everything in one post. Therefore, we’ve decided to focus on the most significant aspects related to the importance of innovation.

In general, the result of innovation should always be improvement. From the society’s perspective, the fundamental outcomes of innovation are economic growth, increased well-being and communication, educational accessibility and environmental sustainability.

Economic growth

Technological innovation is considered as a major source of economic growth. Economic growth refers to the increase in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time. It is conventionally measured as the percent rate of increase in real gross domestic product, or real GDP.
Innovation is responsible for up to 85% of all economic growth.

There’s generally two ways to increase the output of the economy:

• Increase the number of inputs that go to the productive process
• Come up with new ways to get more output from the same number of inputs

The latter describes the essence of innovation quite well. The purpose of innovation is to come up with new ideas and technologies that increase productivity and generate greater output and value with the same input.

According to the aforementioned Stanford study, innovation has been responsible for up to 85% of all economic growth.

If we look at the transformation of the US, once a largely agrarian economy that advanced from emerging nation status in the mid-19^th century to an industrial economy by the First World War, we can see that the agricultural innovations and inventions were actually one of the largest factors that helped bring about the Industrial Revolution.

Vast improvements in agricultural productivity had already previously transformed the way people work in Europe, releasing farmers for other activities and allowing them to move to the city for industrial work. The shift from hand-made to machine-made products increased productivity, directly affecting living standards and growth.

If previously one worker was able to feed only a fraction of their family, it was now possible for one person to produce more in less time to provide for the entire family.
Innovation and the future of jobs 

Technological advancement and increased productivity means major changes for careers today as well. The world economy could more than double in size by 2050 due to continued technology-driven product improvements.

According to the new World Economic Forum report, nearly 133 million new jobs may be created by 2022 while 75 million jobs are displaced by AI, automation and robotics.

Source: World Economic Forum - The Future of Jobs Report 2018

Manual, low-skilled jobs and middle-income roles such as accountants, lawyers and insurance clerks are the ones that will be affected the most over the next decade.

The biggest issue here isn't necessarily that these jobs would disappear completely but the fact that polarization of the labor force becomes more significant. New skill sets are required in both old and new occupations.

How and where people work will also continue to change. There will be more demand for experts, whereas "regular workers" are at risk of having to settle for low-income positions.
Increased well-being

In general, innovation and economic growth increases well-being because living standards rise. According to the Brookings Institution, average life satisfaction is higher in countries with greater GDP per capita. Another research also shows that there’s a link between innovation and subjective wellbeing.

However, not all of the benefits of innovation and growth are evenly distributed. Often, a rise in real GDP means greater income and wealth inequality. Although there isn’t a threshold level for how much inequality is too much, greater socioeconomic gaps are most likely having some negative consequences.

In theory, income inequality isn't a problem itself except when the concrete purchasing power decreases. In practice, however, it does have a number of impacts on our society and collective well-being.
Reduced sickness, poverty and hunger

As already mentioned, developing countries depend on innovation as new digital technologies and innovative solutions create huge opportunities to fight sickness, poverty and hunger in the poorest regions of the world.

Developed countries also rely on innovation to be able to solve their own problems related to these themes.

What comes to reducing hunger, for example, agricultural productivity is critical in the developing countries where the next population boom is most likely to take place. Smallholder farms in developing counties play an important role as up to 80% of the food is produced in these communities.

Developing and sharing agricultural innovations such as connecting farmers to information about the weather, has proven to be an efficient way to help farmers stay in business. Although this is just an example of how innovation can help people continue producing food, innovation provides endless other opportunities that can eventually help reduce poverty and hunger around the world.
Communication and educational accessibility

You probably already knew that The World Wide Web celebrates its 30^th birthday this year. We’ve already seen a huge technological revolution during the past decades and continue to do so in the future.

According to the World Bank Annual Report 2016, even among the poorest 20 percent of the population, 7 out of 10 households have a mobile phone. This means that more people now have mobile phones than sanitation or clean water.

Also, the mobile worker population is expected to grow from around 96 million to more than 105 million by 2020. Innovations in mobile technology such as voice control and augmented reality are enabling workers in completely new ways.

Technology innovation can also help rural areas thrive and become more sustainable. Although there are some barriers to technology adoption, such as low income or user capability, more people can access information an improve  their knowledge despite their socio-economic position or demographic area.

Environmental sustainability

Sustainability and environmental issues, such as climate change, are challenges that require a lot of work and innovative solutions now and in the future.

Earth suffers as consumerism spreads and puts consumption at the heart of modern economy. Although consumerism has a positive impact on innovation as a source of economic growth, the rising consumption of innovative products is often considered as one of the reasons for environmental deterioration.

Often, politics or other methods aren’t enough to make a change – at least not quick enough. Policy changes take time to take effect, which is why the long-term survival of our society and nature depends on new, responsible innovative technologies.

Although new greener technology solutions, such as eco vehicles aren’t necessarily more competitive alternatives to petrol-powered vehicles just yet, they will definitely offer many advantages for the future.
Micro perspective: The importance of innovation for an organization

Now that we’ve looked at the role of innovation from the society’s perspective, we can take a closer look at the importance of innovation for organizations and businesses.

In general, it’s difficult to identify industries where innovation wouldn’t be important. Although certain industries depend on innovation more than others, innovation and the ability to improve considers everyone.

Even highly regulated industries, such as taxis and banks aren’t immune to change. Look what Uber has done to the traditional taxi industry, or how innovation affects financial services.

In general, innovation can deliver significant benefits and is one of the critical skills for achieving success in any business.
Competitive advantage

Competitive advantage means the necessary advancements in capabilities that provide an edge in comparison to competitors of the industry. What these are exactly depends on your business model and the industry you operate in.

As already mentioned, for organizations the ability to get ahead of the competition is one of the most significant reasons to innovate. Successful, innovative businesses are able to keep their operations, services and products relevant to their customers’ needs and changing market conditions.

In fact, according to Deloitte, only 12% of the Fortune 500 companies from 1955 are still in business and half of the S&P 500 companies will be replaced in the next ten years, which is why it’s important to be able to quickly respond to external challenges.

Innovation increases your chances to react to changes and discover new opportunities. It can also help foster competitive advantage as it allows you to build better products and services for your customers.

Maximize ROI

Increased competitive advantage and continuous innovation often has a direct impact on performance and profitability.

According to Global Innovation 1000, there’s a clear difference in both revenue (11%) and EBITDA (22%) growth in favor of the more innovative organizations. These numbers show that innovative companies not only grow faster but are more profitable than the rest.

Although measuring the ROI of innovation might be challenging especially in the beginning or when talking about disruptive innovations, investing in innovation is often a surer way to improve your numbers than not innovating at all.

Increased productivity

Economic growth is driven by innovation and technological improvements, which reduce the costs of production and enable higher output. If we look at this from the perspective of an organization, different automation solutions decrease manual, repetitive work and release time for more important, value-creating tasks.

Improved productivity and efficiency makes work more meaningful as less time needs to be spent on low impact tasks. The more time you’re able to spend on tasks that have a direct impact on your business, such as improving processes, solving problems or having conversations with your customers, the more likely you’re able to actually reduce costs, increase turnover and provide your customers with solutions that truly benefit them.

Positive impact on company culture

Last but not least, innovation also has a positive impact on company culture as it increases the ability to acquire, create and make the best use of competencies, skills and knowledge.

Innovation practices can help build a culture of continuous learning, growth and personal development. This type of innovative environment can again motivate people to constantly improve the way they and their team work.

If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect. – Steven Johnson

When the entire organization is supportive and provides the right tools for the employees to succeed in their jobs, it eventually has a positive effect on how people perceive their jobs.

Conclusion

Generally speaking, the main purpose of innovation is to improve people’s lives. When it comes to managing a business, innovation is the key for making any kind of progress.

Although your innovation activities aren’t necessarily powerful enough to save the world, you should focus on improving the things you can affect.

Small improvements eventually lead to bigger and better ideas that may one day become revolutionary. In the meantime, however, you’re responsible for finding ways to make improvements in your own sphere of influence.

Often, getting started is the hardest part as there are many ways to approach innovation. Our suggestion is to simultaneously work on developing your personal skills and business related aspects. You should, however, start small and pick your focus as it's impossible to achieve everything at once.

If you want to start with innovation, we encourage you to try Viima. It's free for unlimited users!

Design Thinking: Applications

Design thinking finds its application across a variety of professions. From sports, education and research to business, management and design, design thinking is widely used by professionals around the globe.

Design thinking is halfway between analytical thinking and intuitive thinking. Analytical thinking involves purely deductive reasoning and inductive logical reasoning that utilize quantitative methodologies to come to conclusions. However, intuitive thinking refers to knowing something without any kind of reasoning.

These are two extreme kinds of thinking. Design thinking makes use of both the extremes in an optimum manner. The intuitive thinking helps in invention for the future, whereas analytical thinking to create something creative in the present, which is replicable. The willingness to use these futuristic solutions is what is called abductive logic.

Business

Design thinking helps in businesses by optimizing the process of product creation, marketing, and renewal of contracts. All these processes require a companywide focus on the customer and hence, design thinking helps in these processes immensely. Design thinking helps the design thinkers to develop deep empathy for their customers and to create solutions that match their needs exactly. The solutions are not delivered just for the sake of technology.

Information Technology

The IT industry makes a lot of products that require trials and proof of concepts. The industry needs to empathize with its users and not simply deploy technologies. IT is not only about technology or products, but also its processes. The developers, analysts, consultants, and managers have to brainstorm on possible ideas for solving the problems of the clients. This is where design thinking helps a lot.

Education

The education sector can make the best use of design thinking by taking feedback from students on their requirements, goals and challenges they are facing in the classroom. By working on their feedback, the instructors can come up with solutions to address their challenges.

For example, Michael Schurr, a 2^nd grade instructor from New York, realized that his students would be more comfortable with bulletin boards lowered. He also found the idea of creating comfortable semi-private space for working students as it provided them space to study. As a result, his students became more engaged and felt free to move.

Healthcare

Design thinking helps in healthcare as well. The expenditure on healthcare by the government and the cost of healthcare facilities is growing by the day. Experts worldwide are concerned about how to bring quality healthcare to people at low cost.

Venice Family Clinic in Venice, California has come up with innovative solutions to the challenge of opening a low-cost children’s clinic to serve the low-income families. Problems of finance, transportation, and language barriers had to be solved. And all this had to be done at low cost for the poor kids. Fostering good health along with profits was a challenge, as it does not sound sustainable. Using design thinking, the inefficiencies in the system and the perennial crises were addressed.

This was followed by mind-blowing innovations to serve the children. How they solved the various issues will be seen in the later sections of the tutorial.

7 Steps to Becoming an Innovative Person

Performing a handstand terrified me. I didn’t like to be upside down. After several years of training and competing, I often wonder why I was so afraid back then. When I first started flexing my innovation muscles, I felt uncomfortable at times too. At times I just didn’t feel like an innovative person.  Now, I can’t imagine not looking at life differently. Depending on the situation, sometimes I’m looking upside down, sometimes I’m looking sideways, and yes, sometimes I’m looking straight on.

Through my work, I work to help people look at things differently – to be innovative. Why? Because you’re innovative. Your friends are innovative. Your colleagues too. The world’s a better place when we’re all innovating.

Most of us, however, don’t know how to be an innovative person. 

Below are 7 ACTIONS you can take today. 

7 actions to becoming an innovative person

Action #1: Seek Opportunity

Actively seek out opportunities. Non-innovative people wait for opportunities to find them.

Action #2: Be Constantly Curious

Be curious every day. Constantly look to discover the “why” or “how” behind things. Non-innovatives don’t want to dig deeper.

Action #3: Look Ahead

Embrace a future-oriented mindset. Look to what’s ahead. Don’t get stuck in the past. 

Action #4: Embrace Failure

Hug failure. It’s your friend.  Failure makes a great teacher and will lead you to something important. Failure is not an end point. It’s a beginning.

Action #5: Seek Answers

You don’t have all the answers. Work to find them. Get input from others.  If you spend too much time trying to show “You’re right”, well, you’ll be wrong, a lot.

Action #6: Practice Innovation Exercises

Schedule innovative exercises into your daily life. Strengthen your innovation muscles. Too many times i’ve seen a non-innovative person ignore their innovation muscles and get frustrated in the 3 p.m. brainstorm.

Action #7: Learn Your Innovation Strengths

Learn your natural innovation strengths and unlock your everyday innovator. You’ll better understand how you innovate. (Note: Everyone innovates differently.  Learn to innovate your way, not Stephanie’s or Jim’s or Maria’s or Anthony’s.)

A Challenge for You

For the rest of today, ask yourself, “Am I acting like an innovative person?” If the answer is “No”, don’t worry. Make note of the actions described above and put ONE into action today. Tomorrow, do the same thing. When you take action regularly,  you’ll not only act like an innovator, you’ll become one. All you have to do is take action. Soon, you’ll weave innovation into every part of your life. 

How to Apply Design Thinking to Your Life

Use design thinking to build a better future for yourself.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans are the authors of Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, a book based on a course of the same name that they teach at Stanford University (the school’s “most popular class,” according to Fast Company magazine).

Both the book and the course are meant to help people apply the principles of design thinking— a strategy for improving on a product or experience — to their personal and professional lives.

Design thinking is a problem-solving framework that utilizes empathetic, creative, and analytical skills to solve problems.

Normally, designers deal with problems such as the following:

§  A business looking for its next big idea (create a new product or service).

§  A government organization trying to get people to conserve energy or water (solve a social problem).

§  A technology company that wants a user-friendly design for one of its gadgets (meet a consumer need).

However, design thinking can also be used to solve personal problems, and to design and build your future. Below you’ll find an overview of design thinking, and then you’ll discover how to apply design thinking to your life.

An Overview of Design Thinking

The design thinking process involves five steps. These five steps are the following:

1. Empathize.

Design thinking puts people and their needs first. Therefore, the first step of the process is to understand the problem from the perspective of the end-user.

You’re trying to understand the way the consumer does things and why, their needs, and what is meaningful to them. The way to learn about the end-user is through observation and interviews (conversations and engagement). It’s a very hands-on experience.

2. Define.

With the information gathered during the “empathize” phase, the problem solver is better equipped to determine what the real problem or challenge is. During the “define” stage, the needs and the insights that were uncovered in the previous step are catalogued and inventoried and the true problem emerges.

It’s important to keep in mind that framing the right problem is the only way to create the right solution. The “define” step is concluded once a problem statement has been drafted.

3. Ideate.

In this step the problem solver uses a creative mindset to generate as many ideas as possible to solve the problem, without the constraint of existing solutions. The objective isn’t to try to find the “right” answer–which is something that doesn’t exist. Instead, many possibilities and alternatives are explored.

Some of the tools available for ideation include brainstorming, mind mapping, doodling, and so on. Nothing is off limits. After all, once you adopt the designer mindset you know that “you choose better if you choose from a lot of ideas”.

4. Prototyping.

Because design thinkers learn by doing, and they build their way forward, the best ideas from the “ideate” stage are chosen to be turned into simple prototypes (pick between three and five ideas to prototype). That is, a physical or tangible solution is created.

One of the key elements of this step is speed. The idea isn’t to come up with something perfect, but something that you can test quickly. The objective in this step is to get the ideas out there even before the problem solver might think they’re ready, and to fail quickly and cheaply.

5. Test.

Once you have your prototypes, go out into the real world and test them. Accept that failure is part of the design thinking process. In fact, your goal at the testing stage isn’t to be told that your prototypes are a success, but to get feedback so that you can make adjustments and refinements and build a better prototype.

The process of ideate, prototype, and test is repeated until the prototype meets the needs of the end user. Indeed, you can go through the entire process from the first step to the last step several times. Iteration is a fundamental part of design thinking. Here’s an image of the process:

How to Apply Design Thinking to Your Life

Now let’s get going on applying design thinking to your life. We’re going to do this by using Bill and Dave’s book, and their workshops as guides. The emphasis will be mainly on jobs and careers, because that’s what a majority of us spend most of our lives doing. However, keep in mind that design thinking can be applied to the improvement of any life area.

Here’s the question that Bill and Dave start off with: 

Can we apply design thinking to the “wicked problem” of designing your job, your career, and even your life? They argue that you can.

A wicked problem is a big, ambiguous problem that is poorly defined, and poorly bounded. That sounds a lot like the problem of finding work you love—that is, the problem of designing your way to the future you want to have.

When people ask for help in identifying which career path to pursue, they’re often told to identify their passion. However, Bill and Dave argue that this is the wrong approach. This is because studies show that only 20% of the population can identify a singular passion.

The other 80% of the population is either passionate about many different things, or there’s no one thing that rises to the level of “that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life”.  For that 80%, passion isn’t something that they have or find, but something that they work into.

That is, these people should try something new out, see how it’s working, tweak it, and experiment further. And that’s what design thinking is all about. Building a future with design thinking means taking an improvisational view of life, and moving forward by “wayfinding”.

Steps to Follow to Apply Design Thinking to Design Your Career

Here are the steps you should follow in order to apply design thinking to design your job or career:

1. Keep a Good Time Journal.

Let’s assume that you’re feeling unfulfilled at work. In order to determine how to improve this situation, start keeping a “Good Time Journal”. You’re going to keep track of your daily activities for a week to determine which activities you enjoy the most. Ask yourself questions like the following:

§  When do you feel completely involved in the activity you’re carrying out? When are you most mindful?

§  Which activities make you happy?

§  When are you working at your peak level?

§  Which activities make you feel calm and serene?

§  When do you feel that you’re in the state of flow?

§  What are you doing when you feel the most animated and the most present?

Then, use the rest of the design thinking process to redesign your current or next gig so you do more of what you love.

2. Track Your Energy.

Some activities are energizing, while others are energy draining. Log your major activities for a few weeks and note how energized each activity makes you feel. As with the previous exercise, the purpose of this exercise is to notice how your activities affect you. Going through your log will give you ideas on how to improve your routines.

3. Create Three Odyssey Plans.

In this exercise, you’re going to think of several scenarios, or paths, for the next five years of your life. These are trajectories which you could realistically pursue. Look at the following:

§  One scenario is your current life if it simply continues as it is.

§  The second scenario is what you would do if your current life were suddenly gone.

§  For more scenarios, think of what you may want to do with your life. The truth is that most people don’t know what they want, so simply create several different scenarios involving different alternatives that sound interesting to you. Have you ever considered selling all of your possessions and traveling around the world? Did you think you may want to become a lawyer at any point in your life? Has becoming a chef ever crossed your mind?

Include not just career but also personal goals in your Odyssey Plan, such as writing a novel, traveling to South America, learning to play an instrument, and so on.

The point of this exercise is to realize that your life could go in many different directions, and you could be happy in each one. That is, there isn’t one perfect path for you, so stop thinking that if you made a wrong turn somewhere you’ll never lead your “ideal life”.

4. Define Your Problem.

The three exercises you completed in steps 1 to 3 above gave you more information about yourself and your life—who you are and what you want. Now you’re going to take that information to define your problem. Here are some ways you could define your problem:

§  How can I rework my day so I can do more of what makes me happy and less of what I dislike doing?

§  How can I do more things throughout my day that are more energy positive?

§  What does my job need more of so that I can feel more fulfilled?

§  Which skills should I learn to start moving in a new direction?

§  What do I want to do next?

§  Looking honestly at my circumstances, what room do I have to maneuver?

§  Now that I’ve examined the way things are, how can I make them better?

§  How can I create the next version of myself?

§  What do I most need to change?

§  How can I reinvent myself?

5. Ideate.

There’s a difference between navigation and wayfinding. Navigation is when you know your destination and then you plan and follow a route to get there. That is, since you know your exact destination, there are explicit directions you can follow to get there.

The problem with designing your life is that you don’t know exactly where you’re going. You may just have a general idea of “I like this kind of stuff” and “I don’t like that kind of stuff”, and the kind of things that give you energy as opposed to draining you of energy. But not much more than that.

When you know that you want to go somewhere, but you’re not exactly sure where, you use a process called wayfinding.  This is the way hunters find game in the wild. Here’s the process:

§  There’s an antelope or a deer out there, but the hunters don’t know where.

§  However, they know how to track for it.

§  So, they go around from point to point looking for clues that will direct them toward the animal.

§  Each clue that they find leads them to the next one.

§  They move forward in this way–from clue to clue–until they find the animal that they’re looking for.

When you ideate, you come up with possibilities or alternatives to begin wayfinding by using idea generation techniques such as brainstorming. Then, you choose the best ideas you come up with and begin prototyping and testing those ideas.

6. Prototype and Test.

A prototype is a quick, cheap experience that’s readily available that will allow you to learn something you don’t know in relation to the problem that you’re trying to solve.

Instead of just endlessly analyzing things in your head or on paper, you’re getting out there fast and trying something in order to learn. That is, the idea is to build your way forward by doing small experiments, or prototypes.

Think about software designers. They’re always releasing programs with minimal features in order to get feedback as fast possible. This lets them know whether what they’re building is something that the market wants. If so, they keep building prototypes until they’ve built something that sells well.

You should do the same thing: send your ideas out into the world and see how they perform. In other words, test them. Then, come back, iterate, and send something else out into the world to see how it does.

As an illustration, if you’re thinking of going to law school to become a lawyer you can do things such as the following:

§  Ask someone who’s currently going to law school out for coffee and pick their brain

§  See if you can sit in on a law school class.

§  Interview someone who’s a lawyer.

§  Go to a courthouse and observe a trial.

§  See if you can shadow a lawyer for a day.

§  Take a law-related MOOC (massive online open course).

§  Sit outside a courthouse or a large law firm and take photos of people walking in and out.

Continue prototyping, testing, and making adjustments until you’re happy with the results. That is, until you’re sure that you want to be a lawyer, or you’ve decided that the law just isn’t for you.

Conclusion

I was really excited when I came across the idea of applying design thinking to life design. I already know how I’m going to apply design thinking in my life. How about you? Live your best life by using design thinking to create your future.

How To Jump-Start Your Innovation: 8 Ways To Be More Innovative

Popular wisdom suggests innovation is a characteristic some people have and some people—well—don’t. In addition, innovation is often seen as a capability which encompasses the skill of idea generation and not much more. Both are wrong. The good news is you can build your ability to innovate and enhance it in others. Innovation is actually a broad set of skills and a comprehensive process—and lots of us can be successful innovators.

First, know creativity, which is fuel for innovation, is potentially lacking. According to the Adobe State of Create Study, 70% believe creativity makes them better at work and creativity is correlated with 13% higher earnings. But only 41% believe they are creative and only 31% believe they are living up to their creative potential. And this gap is likely impacting more than just the workplace. The World Economic Forum makes a case for the critical nature of innovation in advancing the world economy. Creativity and innovation are important for companies, but also for the economy as a whole—and yet there is more opportunity for people to tap into their creative best.

Developing Innovation Ability

Each of us can be more innovative because contrary to popular opinion, it can be learned, encouraged and even incented. A recent University of California, San Diego study demonstrated monetary incentives helped overcome psychological barriers to innovation and led to a more diverse group of people to offer innovative ideas. Support and encouragement also made a positive difference, especially for those who had lower performance coming into the study. People, who might not have thought of themselves as innovative, contributed as much as those who were from traditionally innovative areas of expertise.

But innovation is more than just the development of novel ideas, and this is encouraging for all of those who want to be more innovative. Researchers at the University of Economics, Prague and Aston University, United Kingdom found a range of capabilities contribute to innovation. In addition to classic idea generation, idea search was also critical as well as processes to support innovation such as communication, involvement of others and execution. Beyond the process to support innovation, organizations and leaders create the conditions for great ideas to take root, develop and be implemented. The bottom line? Innovation involves various skills, and you can build and leverage your own unique contributions to the innovative process.

Leveraging Skills For Innovation

So, how do you innovate more successfully? Here are eight ways:

Be confident. The first step in innovating is to be confident about your abilities. Don’t let your job function or naysayers convince you you’re not innovative. Everyone can contribute, especially given how many different paths there are toward successful innovation.

 Find great material. A key element of innovation is its raw material. In fact, there are some who say there is nothing new. The poet and philosopher Audre Lorde said, “There are no new ideas, only new ways of making them felt.” Exploring the landscape of a topic or spanning the environment for diverse perspectives create the fodder for innovative ideas. If this is a talent of yours, leverage it as an important part of the creative process.

Marshall support. Beyond the development process, innovations also require support from a broader group. Whether it’s a startup requiring investors, or an established company that provides the resources for the idea to flourish, the skills of communicating the idea and persuading others to support it are also important parts of the innovative process.

Learning, reflecting and prototyping. Every great innovation requires prototyping. The process to put innovation into practice and observe the outcomes, learn, reflect and improve takes specialized skills—all part of successful innovation.

Implement, execute and make it happen. Of course, any new idea is only valuable if you have the ability to take it to the finish line. Implementing is also part of the innovative process—determination, perseverance and execution. After all, until ideas are put into action and taken to market, they offer limited value. True innovation is determined by the marketplace and whether users will value the solution you’re offering.  

Continuously improve. Today’s best innovations are never finished. They benefit from reviews, revisions and releases. This too is a

Specialized skill—the ability to be objective enough to find elements about the innovation that aren’t yet perfected and see opportunities for improvement.

Create the conditions. In addition to the skills which are endemic to the innovative process, there are also key contributions which create the conditions for innovation. Leaders who inspire a sense of purpose and value appropriate risk-taking, organizations that reward discovery and inventive actions, and cultures that allow people to bring their best, most diverse talents toward the whole all cultivate an innovative environment.

Even if you haven’t considered yourself particularly innovative, you can build your innovative muscle—and those muscles are diverse. From searching for new ideas to generating them, or from involving others and persuading them to being objective and continuously improving, various skills contribute to innovation. Even as a leader, adding to an organization that embraces innovative behaviors is important to the process. Leverage your own innovative abilities—they are likely broader and more important than you may have thought.