Heather Fraser published “Design works: how to tackle your toughest innovation challenges through business design” five years ago. It demonstrates how organizations can drive innovation and growth through Business Design – a discipline that integrates design-inspired methods and mindsets into business development and planning. Roger Martin said in his forward that “This book tells the story of the 3 Gears of Business Design, simply and practically. Its goal is to provide an easy-to-use guide for organizations that are eager to harness the power of Business Design.” The Korean version of the Design works is published in Korea.
Author: Heather M. F. Fraser / A seasoned business strategist, brand-marketing expert, and longtime entrepreneur and educator, Heather is a global thought leader in Business Design. Heather co-founded Rotman DesignWorks with Roger Martin in 2005 and served as Executive Director of DesignWorks through 2012. She has cultivated Business Design as a discipline, delivered student curriculum, and led innovation programs for over 3000 executives. She advises leading organizations on how to advance their business through innovation, including teams from Procter & Gamble, Nestle, Pfizer, General Electric, Target, and VF Corporation.
Translator: Jaewoo Joo / Jaewoo Joo is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the College of Business Administration and a Participating Professor of Experience Design in the Graduate school of Techno Design, both at Kookmin University. He earned his Ph.D. in Marketing from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Jaewoo writes and teaches about Design Marketing and New Product Development (NPD) through the lens of the Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (JDM).
Translator: Ran Yoon / Ran Yoon is a product planner and marketer at SK Telecom, the leading service carrier company in Korea, and collaborates with a wide variety of planners, developers, and designers. Previously, she worked as a planner and marketer at Samsung Electronics Canada.
David Kelley, the president of the IDEO, visited Toronto and talked with Roger Martin, the former dean of Rotman School of Management, under the title of unleashing the creative potential within us all.
He claimed that we need three things to innovate routinely. They include creative confidence, guided mastery, and design thinking.
First, creative confidence (or self efficacy proposed by Bandura) enables us to go beyond inside-the-box thinking. Next, guided mastery (or a series of small successes) helps us to generate wild ideas without losing our flames. Finally, design thinking (or mindful or open-mind attitude) encourages us to try something new, in particular when we work with others.
While introducing the three elements of routine innovation, he emphasized empathic observation by sharing with us the projects that his employees or students have conducted. For example, his team once aimed to help K-12 students in California eat more healthy food. Their key findings were that lunch is not just for food but a social activity. As such, they proposed games in which kids come back to the table together, sit down together, and eat vegetables together. This game activity successfully led kids to eat more vegetables.
… Samsung is a good example of a “technology push” firm. Samsung has been a late mover in the electronics market. Responding to unparalleled business challenges, the company first expanded its design team from 200 designers in the late 1990s to 1000 designers in 2012. Samsung has made noticeable debuts in winning several international design awards. However, the company’s intuitive and analytic teams needed to work closely before they were able to deeply understand and appreciate each other’s way of working. The forced collaboration produced challenging decision-making conflicts—the types of conflicts that are difficult to resolve without a moderator. Instead, decisions were made exclusively by the intuitive team or exclusively by the analytic team. This issue explains why Samsung has performed well in design awards, but has not yet introduced an iconic product like the iPhone…
Technology-push path
… Apple approaches design thinking differently from Samsung. Its design team does not communicate with its manufacturing team. Instead, an independent team (consisting of Steve Jobs and his supporters) made most of the firm’s business decisions. In the process, Jobs limited the decision-making power of the analytic teams in order for them to be comparable with the power of the intuitive team. Note that although Steve Jobs was often criticized for his assertive decisions, he did free the intuitive team from the analytic team. As a result, Apple products are welcomed by a massive number of consumers—even though their individual features do not necessarily outperform the products manufactured by their competitors …
The article presents research focusing on the development of design thinking in business context. It utilizes balancing intuitive and analytical thinking to determine the exploitation of design thinking in organizations. It explores the decision making processes of two electronic corporations including Apple Inc., and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to offer practical implications to executives who are interested in implementing design thinking in their organizations.
… Samsung is a good example of a “technology push” firm. Samsung has been a late mover in the electronics market. Responding to unparalleled business challenges, the company first expanded its design team from 200 designers in the late 1990s to 1000 designers in 2012. Samsung has made noticeable debuts in winning several international design awards. However, the company’s intuitive and analytic teams needed to work closely before they were able to deeply understand and appreciate each other’s way of working. The forced collaboration produced challenging decision-making conflicts—the types of conflicts that are difficult to resolve without a moderator. Instead, decisions were made exclusively by the intuitive team or exclusively by the analytic team. This issue explains why Samsung has performed well in design awards, but has not yet introduced an iconic product like the iPhone…
… Apple approaches design thinking differently from Samsung. Its design team does not communicate with its manufacturing team. Instead, an independent team (consisting of Steve Jobs and his supporters) made most of the firm’s business decisions. In the process, Jobs limited the decision-making power of the analytic teams in order for them to be comparable with the power of the intuitive team. Note that although Steve Jobs was often criticized for his assertive decisions, he did free the intuitive team from the analytic team. As a result, Apple products are welcomed by a massive number of consumers—even though their individual features do not necessarily outperform the products manufactured by their competitors …
When it comes to innovation, business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, ‘try it, prototype it, and improve it’. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive – proving that something actually operates – and deductive – proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray – which involves suggesting that something may be, and reaching out to explore it.
Because it’s pictorial, design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe.
Design thinking is synthetic. Out of the often-disparate demands presented by sub-units’ requirements, a coherent overall design must emerge. Design thinking is abductive in nature. It is primarily concerned with the process of visualizing what might be, some desired future state and creating a blueprint for realizing that intention. Design thinking is opportunistic: the designer seeks new and emergent possibilities. Design thinking is dialectical. The designer lives at the intersection of often-conflicting demands – recognizing the constraints of today’s materials and the uncertainties that cannot be defined away, while envisioning tomorrow’s possibilities.
In fact, design thinking always meant different things to different players. For some it was about teaching managers how to think like designers; for others, it was about designers tackling problems that used to be the preserve of managers and civil servants; and for others still, it was anything said on the subject of design that sounded smart. To most, it is was merely a new spin on design. All its proponents were, however, united by their ambition for design to play a more strategic role in the world than ‘making pretty.’ Who could argue with that?
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Now in 2023, what is design thinking?
People are gravitated towards different attitudes about design thinking. Some are disappointed by the fact that design thinking fails to produce visible, lasting outcomes. Others pay attention to its unique role in helping people creative. Design thinking might not be a short-term, direct tool, but rather a long-term, indirect mindset.
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Reference 1
Ackermann, R. (2023). Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong. MIT Technology Review.
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Organizations have sought to adopt design thinking aiming at innovation. However, implementing such a creative problem-solving approach based on designers’ mindsets and practices requires the navigation of obstacles. Corporate structure and culture hinder the adoption course, and cognitive barriers affect non-designer engagement. In this regard, training has been used as a means of easing the process. Although considered a crucial step in design thinking implementation, research on training initiatives is scarce in the literature. Most studies mirror that about d.school boot camp and innovative programs developed by companies globally remain unknown. This practice-oriented paper investigates a training blueprint tailored for LG Corporation in South Korea, targeting R & D personnel working in several affiliates that needed creative problem-solving skills to improve business performance. The study findings unveil a customized initiative that expanded the established boot camp model by adding preceding activities to increase learning opportunities and enable empathetic observation. Fundamentally, the customization strategy aimed to provide participants with customer-oriented tools to solve business problems. In addition, the training program reframed the design thinking steps in order to make it relevant for employees and foster corporate implementation goals. Ultimately, this case study supplies literature describing a training blueprint to disseminate design thinking considering two dimensions: individual adoption and organizational implementation challenges.
Figure 1 The overall structure and time allocation of the d.school’s design thinking training program
