transform the way you develop products, services ...

1 Design Thinking by Tim BrownThinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services , processes and even strategy. Reprint R0806E Design Thinking by Tim Brown harvard business review june 2008page 1 COPYRIGHT 2008 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services , processes and even strategy. Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulband then wrapped an entire industry aroundit. The lightbulb is most often thought of as hissignature invention, but Edison understoodthat the bulb was little more than a parlortrick without a system of electric power gener-ation and transmission to make it truly he created that, Edison s genius lay in his ability to con-ceive of a fully developed marketplace, notsimply a discrete device.

2 He was able to envi-sion how people would want to use what hemade, and he engineered toward that wasn t always prescient (he originally be-lieved the phonograph would be used mainlyas a business machine for recording and replay-ing dictation), but he invariably gave great con-sideration to users needs and s approach was an early example ofwhat is now called design thinking a meth-odology that imbues the full spectrum of inno-vation activities with a human-centered designethos. By this I mean that innovation is pow-ered by a thorough understanding, through di-rect observation, of what people want andneed in their lives and what they like or dislikeabout the way particular products are made,packaged, marketed, sold, and people believe that Edison s greatestinvention was the modern R&D laboratoryand methods of experimental wasn t a narrowly specialized scientistbut a broad generalist with a shrewd businesssense.

3 In his Menlo Park, New Jersey, labora-tory he surrounded himself with gifted tinker-ers, improvisers, and experimenters. Indeed,he broke the mold of the lone genius inven-tor by creating a team-based approach to in-novation. Although Edison biographers writeof the camaraderie enjoyed by this merryband, the process also featured endlessrounds of trial and error the 99% perspira-tion in Edison s famous definition of approach was intended not to validatepreconceived hypotheses but to help experi-menters learn something new from each iter-ative stab.

4 Innovation is hard work; Edisonmade it a profession that blended art, craft, Design Thinking harvard business review june 2008page 2 science, business savvy, and an astute under-standing of customers and thinking is a lineal descendant ofthat tradition. Put simply, it is a disciplinethat uses the designer s sensibility andmethods to match people s needs with whatis technologically feasible and what a viablebusiness strategy can convert into customervalue and market opportunity.

5 Like Edison spainstaking innovation process, it often en-tails a great deal of believe that design thinking has much tooffer a business world in which most manage-ment ideas and best practices are freely avail-able to be copied and exploited. Leaders nowlook to innovation as a principal source of dif-ferentiation and competitive advantage; theywould do well to incorporate design thinkinginto all phases of the process. Getting Beneath the Surface Historically, design has been treated as adownstream step in the development process the point where designers, who have playedno earlier role in the substantive work of inno-vation, come along and put a beautiful wrap-per around the idea.

6 To be sure, this approachhas stimulated market growth in many areasby making new products and technologiesaesthetically attractive and therefore more de-sirable to consumers or by enhancing brandperception through smart, evocative advertis-ing and communication strategies. During thelatter half of the twentieth century design be-came an increasingly valuable competitiveasset in, for example, the consumer electron-ics, automotive, and consumer packagedgoods industries. But in most others it re-mained a late-stage , however, rather than asking designersto make an already developed idea more at-tractive to consumers, companies are askingthem to create ideas that better meet consum-ers needs and desires.

7 The former role is tacti-cal, and results in limited value creation; thelatter is strategic, and leads to dramatic newforms of , as economies in the developedworld shift from industrial manufacturing toknowledge work and service delivery, innova-tion s terrain is expanding. Its objectives areno longer just physical products; they are newsorts of processes, services , IT-powered inter-actions, entertainments, and ways of commu-nicating and collaborating exactly the kindsof human-centered activities in which designthinking can make a decisive difference.

8 (Seethe sidebar A Design Thinker s PersonalityProfile. )Consider the large health care provider Kai-ser Permanente, which sought to improve theoverall quality of both patients and medicalpractitioners experiences. Businesses in theservice sector can often make significant inno-vations on the front lines of service creationand delivery. By teaching design thinking tech-niques to nurses, doctors, and administrators,Kaiser hoped to inspire its practitioners to con-tribute new ideas.

9 Over the course of severalmonths Kaiser teams participated in work-shops with the help of my firm, IDEO, and agroup of Kaiser coaches. These workshops ledto a portfolio of innovations, many of whichare being rolled out across the of them a project to reengineernursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospi-tals perfectly illustrates both the broadernature of innovation products and the valueof a holistic design approach. The core projectteam included a strategist (formerly a nurse),an organizational-development specialist, atechnology expert, a process designer, a unionrepresentative, and designers from IDEO.

10 Thisgroup worked with innovation teams of front-line practitioners in each of the four the earliest phase of the project, thecore team collaborated with nurses to identifya number of problems in the way shift changesoccurred. Chief among these was the fact thatnurses routinely spent the first 45 minutes ofeach shift at the nurses station debriefing thedeparting shift about the status of methods of information exchange weredifferent in every hospital, ranging from re-corded dictation to face-to-face they compiled the information theyneeded to serve patients in a variety of ways scrawling quick notes on the back of any avail-able scrap of paper, for example, or even ontheir scrubs.