MIT Sloan School of Management published a video with a speech by Tim Brown, CEO at IDEO, as part of their Dean’s Innovative Leader Series. IDEO is a design consultancy based in Palo Alto, California, and his speech is titled “Innovation Through Design Thinking”.

You can watch the video here.

Here is my summary of his speech:

Design thinking is one of many approaches to innovation. In order to understand the uniqueness of Design Thinking one has to look at the landscape of elements that are relevant for innovation. These elements can be grouped into three areas which are potential sources for innovation

• Technology (Innovation that is feasible)
• Business (Innovation that is viable)
• People (Innovation that is desirable)

Depending on the weight of these three dimension, different forms of innovation emerge.

• Technology driven innovation starts with technologies goals and looks for needs to satisfy and businesses to build.
• Business driven innovation starts by analyzing organizational resources, how these can be used through the organizations capabilities and deriving the implications for technology and markets (the people).
• Designers approach the challenge of innovation through the lens of people which makes design essentially a human centered process. Only then the search for feasible technological solutions and viable business models begins.

These three fields can be combined in different combinations which lead to different types of innovation:

• Technology + People = Functional Innovation
• Business + People = Marketing/Brand Innovation (Emotional Innovation)
• Business + Technology = Process Innovation

Business + Technology + People = “This is where the really cool stuff happens”

The design of new products and services falls into three phases

1. Inspiration

• Observe and Inquire
• Tell Stories
• Synthesize

2. Ideation

• Brainstorm
• Experiment

3. Implementation

• Prototype
• Evaluate

Most organization focus on ideation (how to get new ideas) when they should actually spend more time for inspiration and the actual implementation in order to create value. When you are out of ideas it doesn’t help to improve your brainstorming skills - one should better look for new inspiration.

In this context market research has its own unique role which is to generate and evaluate ideas, but not to predict the success of ideas.

Nevertheless Design Thinking is not just about methodology, it is just as much about culture. It’s about being inspired and inspiring.

Design Thinking is a human centered approach to innovation.

Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk

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