Design Thinking is the best innovation method. And it is not even close! In the 2019 Alchemist Accelerator Survey, 46% of Executives voted Design Thinking as the the most effective method to support Innovation.
The answer to the question "how to innovate" requires an understanding of what needs to happen to arrive at a new innovation. First you need to understand what people need. That is, are you solving a problem people have or are you just creating an interesting idea? Design Thinking provides the answer to understanding what people need. Knowing what people need provides the right starting point to innovate. Having successfully found a real need and arrived at a solution, the next step is to turn the solution into a successful product/service or experience.
Understanding what people actually need can often result in reframing the original problem that the team set out to solve. Eli Woolery says that Reframing the way that a problem is viewed can inspire a new movement. It can also be a powerful way to create innovative design solutions to challenging problems and even create new and disruptive business models.
Relying on one survey result would be an over simplification of the complexity involved in successful innovation programs. Further reading shows that Design Thinking is the best method for arriving at relevant solutions based around the real needs of users. This is why it is considered the best methodology for innovation by leaders. Without the right idea, there is no point in continuing to apply resources as they are likely to result in failure in the end. Meeting peoples needs requires a lot more than just arriving at the right solution! What follows are some thoughts on what you do with that great idea/solution that you created through design thinking in order to make it real.
Many methodologies support innovation and in a more nuanced article from Unymira, Norbert Bader discusses which method is best at each stage of creating value through innovation. He describes three distinct stages to achieve innovation: value creation, value solution and value production.
Design Thinking is the method of choice for value creation because it helps to more clearly identify problems that users find valuable through its early and continuous focus on the users needs.
Vijay Kumar of IIT, the Illinois Institute of Technology, suggests that corporations tend to approach the question of how to innovate in three different ways:
- Innovation driven by technology
- Innovation driven by business processes
- Innovation driven by design.
He believes that innovation can occur through any of the three approaches, but in order to create and deliver real value, the three must intersect with each other at some point. For example the technology and design approaches have the most chance of intersecting during the concept creation stages. Read more here.
By any measure Design Thinking adds value to a corporation and its innovation process. In a study by the Design Management Institute, Design led companies outperformed other companies by over 220% over a ten year period. Thats the answer to how you innovate successfully!
At the same time it would be wrong to think that Design Thinking is the only methodology that helps you innovate. Larry Keeley of the Doblin Group has written and presented extensively about the nature of innovation and the fact that most breakthrough innovations require breakthroughs in three areas of innovation: configuration, the offering and experience. Keeley goes on to say you need at least 5 innovations (from his 10 types of innovation matrix) to make a breakthrough/disruptive solution. That makes sense, otherwise it is just an improvement that can easily be copied. Take a look at his 10 types of innovation to better understand how to place your design thinking work into a framework for creating breakthrough success.
The MIT Sloan Management Review article "The Five Stages of Successful Innovation" offers another interesting framework for organizing innovation.
Teams that focus too heavily on arriving at the right solution and do not have methods and tools to help them take the solution from an idea to a successful implementation are likely to be disappointed with how often their "ideas" seem to fail. It is surprising how often you will hear people say "we tried that idea before and it did not work" implying that the idea did not work, whereas in reality a team that does not have the proper skills and methodologies to execute ideas successfully is likely to fail even with the best idea because the ability to execute an idea and bring it to market successfully is not very widely found in many corporations.
Finally, make sure to audit your projects, paying specific attention to understanding if it was the idea or the implementation that caused the project to fail. It is the best way to improve how you innovate. Larry Keeley says that 95% of Innovation projects fail and this is backed up by work done by Edward De Bono who claims that that 95% of the failures in projects are due to people. Doing an audit will give you a big clue as to whether or not you need to shore up your teams ideation and research skills (Design Thinking methods) or whether you need to focus on execution and implementation methods and skills (Lean, Agile etc.).