Design Thinking: Unleash Your Innovation

Written by Tecwyn Hill | 3 min read
Published on: February 12th 2018 - Last modified: October 13th, 2022
Design Thinking - An open box radiates light

Sometimes organizations are shackled, not by a lack of resources, but by a lack of executive imagination. The challenges faced by business leaders are real, varied, and complex, and the risk of thinking off-center and 'outside-the-box' can often be too daunting. After all, it is human nature to put on the blinkers, plod along, and not challenge oneself... Jack can just as easily live in the box, as outside it. So why turn the handle?

Design Thinking

... But in this intense business whirlwind, fresh perspectives, new tools, and modern approaches are required. Design Thinking is one of them.

The Design Thinking process embodies a more creative non-linear way of business transformation. It makes use of virtual prototypes to develop business models and content quickly, efficiently and economically. Entering this mindset means rebooting an organization’s approach to problem-solving and transformation, and recalibrating how ideas are generated and developed.

However, despite its name, this methodology is not a principle exclusively used by designers. Instead, it offers a cross-section of business, creativity, and technology. It takes elements from each of these worlds and creates its nebula to solve human problems.

Design Thinking: More Than an end Result

As discussed in part one of this blog series, “From Best Practice to Next Practice”, Design Thinking puts the customer back in charge and acts as a catalyst to industry Next Practice. It is no longer enough to merely identify a problem and solve it—you must understand why it is a problem for your users. Design Thinking is inherently human-centric, and it allows ideas and information to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge gained. It is a concept focused on solutions and not merely the problem.

Design Thinking should be the epicenter of strategy development and organizational change, fostering a workplace culture focused on solving problems. It applies to products, services, and processes–in fact, anything that needs to be improved.

The five key phases of Design Thinking are:

  • There is a challenge: How do I solve it?
  • I have learned something: How do I act upon it?
  • There is an opportunity: What do I create?
  • There is an idea: How do I build upon it?
  • I tried something: How do I evolve it?

Benefits of Design Thinking Confidence

Design Thinking introduces a new way of escaping traditional constraints with visual thinking, creativity, and innovation. Design Thinking questions our assumptions and strategic capability, and gets us thinking about our assumptions, while building our confidence in taking part in collaborative creation.  Design Thinking helps us find a better way to tackle the complacency that keeps things stale and inefficient.

Because this concept puts end-users at the center of the process, it also helps with the development of products and solutions that specifically meet the needs of the user. This insight allows us to get close enough to our audience to see where their frustrations lie, and how we can make their lives and experiences better and more fulfilling.

According to a 2016 study by Forrester Research Consulting, design-led companies had a 41% higher market share, a 46% higher competitive advantage overall, 50% more loyal customers, and in 70% of cases, their digital experiences beat competitors.

Benefits of Design Thinking include:

Pools collective expertise: By building multidisciplinary teams and bringing many skills to the table, we break out of our respective fields to leverage our collective wisdom, experience, and expertise.

Harvests empathy: We can better understand and identify the needs and challenges of our customers.

Tests, re-tests, and tests again: The practice of ‘design, test, and iterate’ is central to this business strategy and it yields powerful results and ideas. The creation of rapid prototypes and encouraging fast feedback from users and customers means management spends less time, effort, and money on any one idea.

Design Thinking: For Organizations of all Shapes and Sizes

Design-led organizations come in all different shapes and sizes and include startups, scale-ups, enterprise companies, and the humble multinational conglomerate. But how you approach Design Thinking depends entirely on your company’s culture and scale. Enterprises that use cross-disciplinary teams led by customer-focused design, and which share knowledge effectively, will rise to the top of their sector.

From the get-go in 2009, Signavio has committed to embracing these innovations and enabling your success with the devices and working practices of today, with the future of your business in mind. SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite embraces Design Thinking and leapfrogs the expected, looking beyond traditional process maps and case models to more customer-centric and human constructs. In fact, Signavio was the first to combine Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) with Process Management, and the results of Design Thinking workshops can even be recorded in the form of infographics with SAP Signavio Process Manager.

Understanding is the new selling, and Design Thinking helps us to live and breathe like a customer. This way, you can continuously adapt to meet your users’ swaying needs and expectations. Putting the customer first and understanding what they’re looking for is essential to user retention and loyalty.

... Jack may have been happily living in his box, but 2018 is the year to set him free.

Check back next week for part three of this blog series: Customer Centric: Revolution not evolution

Unleash your Design Thinking innovation

See why Signavio is a leading provider of BPM solutions. Try SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite yourself by registering now for a free 30-day trial

Published on: February 12th 2018 - Last modified: October 13th, 2022