Take aways from “Design Thinking”

I have a long running fascination with IDEO, the design consultancy behind many of the world’s most inspiring and functional products/services.  As a business junkie, I consume lots of literature on the processes used by companies to innovate.  If you share my interests, I suggest “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, and the recently appointed head of the Stanford Design School.  My creative license, analysis, and interpretation of his work appears below:

1. The role of design has evolved.  It is not or at least should not be an aftethought to conception of a new product or solution.  Failure to adhere to this rule creates GM vehicles like the Pontiac Aztek.  Indeed, designers should be intimately involved with the creation of the solution and not merely the boxing/packaging/marketing.
2. Frequent prototyping is critical.  Whether you write legal briefs or design boxer briefs, it behooves you to “learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and to identify new directions that further prototypes might take.”
3. You can reduce costs, increase revenues, and do a better job of pleasing your customers if you pay attention to process innovations.  I would credit much of Target’s success to improving the experience of shopping.  Paying attention to the procedure, whether formal or informal, used by your customers and your employees can give you much insight into how to improve experience.
4. Speaking of performance, experience, and innovation, you might do well by looking to how other industries have solved the problems you are trying to solve.  A Professor of mine, Bernard Black, has referenced the airline industry as a model for how to reduce physician error and consequently the costs of our medical care system.  In order to look effectively to other industries, you’ll have to take a more abstract view of the problem you are trying to solve.
5. Creative genius can be boiled down to “hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery process and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement.”
6. Sometimes the best place to look is outside your core customer.  Instead of asking why people buy your products or services, you might learn more by asking why they don’t.  Insights into the thought process of your customer will no doubt be generated.  See Shimano Bike Company and how they discovered and some might argue created a new market for their very 19th century product, the bicycle.
7. What innovations do your constraints as a company or the constraints of your customers demand?  This is an especially important question for philanthropies or organizations looking to deliver aid.  If your “customer”, the poor individual in sub-saharan Africa, cannot afford medicine, this constraint of COST might require you to develop a product or solution to work around or reduce the impact fo this constraint.
8. Think about what abundance has wrought.  In a world of excess, how can you provide something that is lacking.  Might you help people save time?  Might you create products or services that enhance their relationships or allow them to find new ones?  Might you appeal to the parts of our humanity that know no bounds, the search for meaning perhaps?  Knowing that people find meaning in experiences and relationships should help you innovate.
9. The most successful products are not the ones that got to market first but rather the ones that created an “emotional and functional appeal.”  See iPod.
10. Do you have the opportunity to engender a massive cultural or behavioral shift?  Have you even asked yourself this question?  The world of profit and non profit is filled with problems begging for a solution.  The answer most commonly given is “so many things would have to change in order for this to be solved…”  Instead of simply saying that, list what must be changed and figure out if there isn’t a way you can design for the problem.
11. Problems and solutions have people at their heart.  Are you creating for people or are you creating for the abstract set of statistics provided by your marketing department?

I think I may write more on this topic.  Perhaps on process innovations and the approach suggested by Dr. Atul Gawande.