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Design Thinking for Business Innovation
Dr. Jeanne M. Liedtka
This course will provide an overview of the process and tools used for design thinking, and examine their
application in organizational situations.
Workload: 2-4 hours/week Taught In: English
About the Course
Design thinking is a popular new idea in the business world - organizations as diverse as entrepreneurial
start-ups, big established corporations, and government and social service organizations are experimenting
with design thinking as an alternative approach to traditional problem-solving. Accelerated by the
spectacular rise of Apple and IDEO, design thinking is seen as offering a new approach better suited for
dealing with the accelerating pressures for growth and innovation faced by so many organizations today.
But design thinking can remain mysterious for people interested in introducing this approach into their
decision-making processes. Demystifying it is the focus of this course.
Though designing as a craft requires years of dedicated education and talent to master, design thinking, as a
problem solving approach, does not. In this course, we work with the following model that contains four
questions and ten tools:
The four sequential questions that take us on a journey through an assessment of current reality (What is?),
the envisioning of a new future (What if?), the development of some concepts for new-business
opportunities (What wows?), and the testing of some of those in the marketplace (What works?). The
process of design thinking begins with data gathering: at the outset of the design process, designers gather a
great deal of data on the users they want to create value for. They mostly do this through ethnographic
methods like experience mapping, rather than traditional methods like focus groups and surveys. Farther
along in the process, designers make their new ideas concrete (in the form of prototypes) and go out and get
better data from the real world in a process that is hypothesis-driven. That is, they treat their new ideas as
hypotheses to be tested. They surface the assumptions underlying their hypotheses and test them – usually
looking for the kind of behavioral metrics that will allow them to iterate their way to improved value
propositions.
Accompanying the four questions is a set of new tools to help business people achieve the same kind of
disciplined approach to innovation and growth that they bring to the rest of their business. In this course,
we will look at the stories of a wide variety of organizations - major corporations like IBM, entrepreneurial
start-ups like MeYouHealth, and even social service organizations like The Good Kitchen - all using the
design thinking tools and approach to achieve better outcomes.
Course Syllabus
Week 1: What is Design Thinking? We will begin our course by unpacking what we mean by design
thinking and why it is more effective than traditional business methods when the goal is innovation in the
business environment. By looking at the case history of The Good Kitchen, a Denmark program for
providing meals for the elderly, we will explore how the mindset and practice of the innovation team that
partnered with innovation consultant Hatch & Bloom enabled them to achieve innovation and growth.
We’ll conclude session 1 by examining what kinds of problems and challenges are best suited for a design
thinking approach.
Week 2: How can we prepare ourselves to be leaders of innovation? Design thinking is not only about
process and tools, however. It is about people as well - about you as a design thinker and about the people
you want to create value for and with. And so, before we jump into the process of using design thinking to
generate and test ideas, we want to first focus on your own mindset and look at how whether your mind is
prepared to both see and to act on opportunity when it shows up in your world. We will examine this issue
by looking at the stories of two very capable managers George and Geoff - and how their differing
mindsets impact their ability to lead innovation and growth. We will also look at the role of visualization
tools that use imagery and storytelling to bring ideas to life.
Week 3: How can you use design thinking to generate ideas? Now we will take a deeper dive into the
design thinking process, looking at how we can use it to generate better ideas. This week, we will look at
the story of an entrepreneur, Chris Cartter, and his start-up, MeYouHealth, as they worked with Boston
design firm, Essential Design, to understand the kind of opportunity that social networking might hold for
helping us to improve our health. Examining what already exists is the first step in the design thinking
process. As part of assessing what is designers “follow the customer home” and explore the problems they
are trying to solve in life versus their product use. Once they have thoroughly explored and looked for
patterns in what is, designers look towards the future and ask what if? These two questions - what is and
what if - along with the tools associated with them, will be the focus of week 3. This is the creative part of
the process - but it also contains a disciplined approach. Ethnographic techniques like journey mapping
help us dig deep to understand the whole customer experience. Tools like mind mapping help us make
sense of the data collected. Tools like structured brainstorming and concept development help move from
the creation of a mass of unrelated ideas to the construction of robust concepts that are worth moving into
testing.
Week 4: How can you use design thinking to test ideas? Having generated all these great ideas, what’s
next? The design thinking process now helps us to take the many ideas we have generated, and figure out
how to figure out which ones are likely to produce the specific kind of outcomes we want -whether these
take the form of improved nutrition for the elderly (The Good Kitchen), healthier life style choices
(MeYouHealth) or even more “hot leads” emanating from your trade shows (in the IBM example we will
look at in this session). In this session, we will follow the activities of an IBM team working closely with
experience marketing agency, George P. Johnson, as they develop and test ideas for a revolutionary
approach to trade show participation. This process begins by asking what wows? This question brings
together the customer and business cases supporting our new concepts. Typically, the “wow” zone occurs
at the intersection of three criteria: somebody wants it, we can create and deliver it, and doing so has the
potential to produce the outcomes we as an organization want. Then we ask what works? and conduct
small experiments to test out whether our assumptions are in fact accurate. Design thinking tools
like prototyping, co-creation and learning launch help us along the way.
Week 5: So what? Having now completed our review of the design thinking process, looked at some tools,
and examined our own mindsets to be sure that we are prepared to lead, we turn to the question of
outcomes. What kinds of changes can we expect to see coming out of the process? And moving forward,
what do we need to do to capitalize on the opportunities that design thinking brings?
Recommended Background
Anyone interested in innovation in an organizational context would benefit from this class.
Suggested Readings
Designing for Growth: A manager’s design thinking toolkit, by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie.
Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works, by Jeanne Liedtka, Andrew King
and Kevin Bennett.