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Innovation is a bit of a paradox. Publicly, corporations claim to excel at it. But privately, they fret they’re doing it poorly. Compli-cating matters further, the incessant march of well-funded com-panies from Silicon Valley attempting to “eat the world” means the penalty for falling short has never been higher.

In survey after survey, global executives rank innovation at the top of their long-term business imperatives. But how, exactly, does innovation happen? Does one need what Jackson Pollack brought to an 18’ canvas or, as Hemingway said of Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, “talent as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings?”

Steve Jobs might argue yes. But fortunately for the rest of us, Design Thinking - a concept whose practitioners and evangelists are rapidly swelling - argues the opposite. It claims innovation is a process that can be taught to anyone, assuming they have a capacity for empathy and the ability to temporarily place their ego on a shelf.

In this paper, we will explore the tenets of Design Thinking and examine how they can be applied at mature corporations grap-pling with legacy IT landscapes and fragmented workforces.

Design Thinking: An Approach To Innovation That Scales

- By Gaurav Palta and Suraj Ramaprasad -

CONSULTING

What exactly is Design Thinking?When one googles ‘Design Thinking’, they quickly discover it’s

much easier to find flattering platitudes than a definition of

the actual thing. Indeed, as one teacher said to another as they

walked out of a conference on Design Thinking, “I think I missed

something. I still don’t understand what design thinking is. Do

you?” The other teacher shook her head and said, “I think it’s a

curriculum, but I’m not really sure.”

To help bridge the gap, a concise definition can be distilled from

Stanford’s d.school, a department fully dedicated to Design

Thinking’s tenets. In short, Design Thinking is an iterative process

with five basic components:

1. Choose a target set of users and explore the emotional basis of their experiences

(i.e. empathize)

2. Create models to define and explain these experiences

3. Brainstorm solutions with the potential to improve these experiences

4. Rapidly prototype these solutions, exhibiting thoughtful restraint

5. Test the solutions, promoting the good ones and eliminating the bad ones

Source: http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/

EMPATHIZE

PROTOTYPEDEFINE

TEST

IDEATE

The Design Thinking Framework

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Start with EmpathyAs stated, Design Thinking begins with exploration of the emotion-

al basis of a set of users. Said more simply, one must walk a mile in

someone else’s shoes.

To do this effectively, practitioners must place their ego to the side

and empathize with users’ experiences. What brings them joy and

frustration during a given experience? How do the tools and tech-

nology they interact with make them feel?

From a problem definition perspective, this is fundamentally dif-

ferent from the logic-based business thinking that has traditionally

driven product development. Historically, product managers have

made their living correlating quantifiable features with measure-

able benefits: state the problem, define the solution that directly

solves the problem.

To demonstrate, let’s examine how people heat their homes. From

a business thinking point-of-view, we observe that by installing a

furnace, we can warm people inside a house. And by attaching it

to a thermostat with lots of functionality (i.e. buttons), we can en-

able people to control their heating schedule with a high degree of

precision. The combination of these two elements should theo-

retically lead to an optimal end-product, and indeed is where the

industry has spent the past 25 years.

Thermostat company Nest, however, took a different approach. As

Nest CEO Tony Fadell said to Inc. magazine, “At the end of the day,

you have to espouse a feeling – in your advertisements, in your

products. And that feeling comes from your gut.”

What Nest realized is that many people feel a twinge of stress

each time they look at their thermostat as they contemplate the

responsibility of programming complex thermostats to accom-

modate changing seasons and vacation schedules.

Nest translated this emotional insight into a product that disrupt-

ed an industry. Eschewing complexity, Nest released an elegantly

simple product that learns people’s preferences and eventually

goes on an auto-pilot, making users feel liberated, thrifty and

tech-savvy. That’s something that can’t be accomplished through

the addition of more buttons. And it can’t be understood without

empathy.

Source: Seton Innovation & Technology Commercialization Team

Problem ProblemUnderstandSolution Solution

DESIGN THINKING

ABDUCTIVETHINKING

BUSINESS THINKING

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Create Models Emotional insights are often earned through interviews and ob-servations from several members of a team. To eventually enable innovation, these insights must travel from the disparate minds where they originated into a shared, lucid model. Traditionally, teams would turn to tools such as PowerPoint, which do a nice job articulating linear process flows and neatly bullet-pointed narra-tives. But the messy reality is that real world problems often aren’t linear.

Practitioners of Design Thinking accepted this, and have instead turned to collaborative model building. Teams organize sticky notes on a board with joining arrows or draw free-form flow dia-grams capturing the activities within an ecosystem and the emo-tional responses that result. Fundamentally, humans communi-cate through stories. Design Thinking models enable teams to tell the story of their customers’ journeys.

The insight- generating potential of modeling was observed by a recent Infosys Consulting team doing an engagement with a lead-ing global software company. The company, which prides itself on being a learning organization, realized that somewhere along the way it had somehow forgotten how to learn. Engagement metrics with learning management modules were down, and, as people often derive positive energy from personal growth, morale was weak.

The initial response of the software company was to implement a fresh learning management application with more bells and whis-tles than the incumbent. They selected a vendor and hired Infosys Consulting to come in for program delivery.

When the Infosys team arrived, however, they felt something was amiss. Talking with employees at either end of the engagement spectrum, they realized people at the firm were unhappy with the fundamental structure of workplace learning.

To model employee’s feelings, the Infosys Consulting team dis-tilled the results of their dozens of interviews into five distinct per-sonas, giving each a full identity and a name (e.g. “Cecilia the Cyn-ic”, “Lucie the Ladder Climber”). They then mapped the way each persona interacted with learning and identified the spot where the process seemed to break down. The amalgamation of these models led to a crucial insight: people wanted to learn in a way that flowed seamlessly between work and play instead of exiling learning to an isolated box requiring them to stop their work and shift to an alternate application.

Rapidly Prototype and Test SolutionsBuilding on these core insights, the consulting team began rapid-

ly ideating and implementing new ways of naturally embedding

learning into the flow of the lives of the five personas. Fully func-

tional masterpieces were skipped in favor of basic prototypes that

could quickly be put in front of users to evaluate engagement.

To do this honestly, many solutions must be put in front of users,

and most of them need to be quickly acknowledged as failures.

For this to stick, a team’ s culture needs to remove any negative

stigma from solutions that don’t work. If not, individuals will stop

taking risks or will try to internally sell mediocre solutions, and the

wrong ideas will win.

The team began building and rolling out new learning solutions

to subsets of each persona. Some ideas, like impromptu, mo-

bile-enabled matchmaking between employees of similar inter-

ests to encourage “Montessori for adults”, failed within certain

segments but received high marks in others. Other solutions, such

as pushing five blog posts that align with employees’ professional

and personal interests exactly when they had a 30-minute break

in their calendar, were quickly picked up and rolled out to the larg-

er organization.

Ontological Design Meets Big DataIn a sense, Design Thinking borrows core tenets from ontological design, which is the concept that what you design, designs you back. By respecting the natural flow of employees’ days and using technology to embed learning in a natural way, one can tap into people’s innate desire to become a better version of themselves.

Putting this into practice, Infosys Consulting experts were recently on an engagement where they were confronted with a large mo-bile workforce of millennial technicians tasked with supporting customers in the field.

The technicians were following a multi-step process to resolve customer issues: they first identified issues at customer sites and then passed them to back-office staff for instructions on how to resolve. While theoretically efficient – detailed knowledge could be concentrated with fewer people – the approach resulted in slow resolution times and stunted both the natural rhythms and the morale of the technicians.

The team observed this and prototyped a solution to place diag-nostic tools directly in the hands of technicians. By cataloguing the knowledge embedded in the firm, they realized they could leverage artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to supply workers with accurate “digital assistants” on their iPhones. This innovation enabled technicians to diagnose and solve problems on the fly, resulting in reduced customer wait times, a $6 million annual re-duction in support costs and happier, more engaged workers.

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Exhibit Thoughtful Restraint One of the biggest temptations in product design is to continue

adding features until no possible need is left unmet. The reality,

however, is that this approach leads to bloated products that

please no one. Design Thinking encourages teams to search for

the vital features in a solution and to resist the temptation to add

those that aren’t necessary.

In Paris, there is a famous restaurant in the heart of Saint Germain

des Pres that has thrived for decades called Le Relais de l’Entre-

cote. Instead of following the highly sanctified precedents of

French cuisine that call for a broad selection of traditional favor-

ites, the restaurant serves only one thing: steak frites. When diners

are seated, a waitress approaches their table and asks two ques-

tions: how they’d like their meat cooked and what they’d like to

drink (the latter often satisfied with a simple response of “carafe

of vin rouge”). To dine here is to experience freedom. Your needs

are fully met – a nice salad arrives first, followed by delicious en-

trecote smothered in a secret green sauce with a side of perfect

frites – yet you’re completely unencumbered by the responsibility

of correctly navigating a list of choices laced with implicit relation-

ships and potential pitfalls.

Examples can certainly be found in the tech world as well: Uber

asks a single question of “Where To?”, and Square Cash simply

wants to know who you’re sending cash to and for how much.

These apps provide singular utility and have distanced themselves

from peers trying to be all things to all people. To paraphrase an

old adage, it’s often what you don’t include that matters.

The Design PremiumTo place a tangible value on the power of design-led innovation,

the Design Management Institute, an international organization

that focuses on cross-functional design, measured the perfor-

mance of companies committed to design as an integral part

of their business strategy relative to the broader market. To do

this, they tracked the performance of a $10,000 investment in

design-led companies relative to the overall S&P 500. Incredibly,

over the past 10 years, design-led companies have outperformed

the S&P 500 by an emphatic 211%. (See chart below.)

There is no question companies have plenty of challenges as they

move forward in today’s digital age. As Vishal Sikka, CEO of Info-

sys, recently stated, “Businesses are facing an increasing sprawl in

their IT landscapes, while at the same time trying to free up resources

into new areas that are critical for their future. A new set of resources

is a necessary essential to addressing this multi-dimensional chal-

lenge.”

To enable technical innovation, companies certainly need to put

a proper foundation in place: stable, interconnected platforms

with clean, accessible data. But by combining these elements

with design-led innovation, they can enable themselves to create

innovative solutions that both harness the power of big data and

bring joy to employees and customers, thereby setting the table

for ongoing corporate success.

06/2005 06/06 06/07 06/08 06/09 06/10 06/11 06/12 06/13 06/14 06/15 12/15

DESIGN VALUE INDEX; 2005-2015

$ 45.000

$ 40.000

$ 35.000

$ 30.000

$ 25.000

$ 20.000

$ 15.000

$ 10.000

DVI

S&P 500

211%

Source: http://www.dmi.org/?DesignValue

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© 2017 Infosys Limited, Bangalore, India. All Rights Reserved. Infosys believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice. Infosys acknowledges the proprietary rights of other companies to the trademarks, product names and such other intellectual property rights mentioned in this document. Except as expressly permitted, neither this documentation nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, printing, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Infosys Limited and/ or any named intellectual property rights holders under this document.

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CONSULTING

Gaurav PaltaPartner – Strategy and Design Practice, Infosys Consulting (U.S.)

Gaurav heads the enterprise AI practice for In-fosys Consulting in the U.S. His practice blends design thinking with cutting edge AI capabili-ties to create transformational shifts in experi-ence and productivity for customers and the workforce. A cornerstone of the practice is how

Suraj RamaprasadPartner – Energy, Communications and Services Practice, Infosys Consulting (Europe, Asia)

Suraj Ramaprasad is a partner in the Energy, Communications, Utilities and Services prac-tice for Infosys Consulting, overseeing a diverse portfolio of transformation work for some of the biggest global corporations across Europe

About the Authors

“purposeful AI” is shaping the future of work, where solutions amplify humans to achieve deeper engagement and continuous learning. His areas of focus in-clude hi-tech, manufacturing, retail and services, having supported numerous Fortune 100 clients through their automation journeys. He also partners with leading product, platform and IoT companies to create viable go to market solutions.

and Asia. He has a 20 year background in management consulting and his expertise ranges from the oil and gas industry, to the utilities, resources and telecommunications sectors. Suraj’s focus and passion is helping senior ex-ecutives identify value leakage resulting from information asymmetry and organizational silos, and designing transformation programs to deliver value uplift. In addition, his teams are constantly developing innovation concepts on how to leverage the power of digital in areas such as industry business platforms, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence.