The Revolution of Things will just flourish if constant innovation happens. Innovation usually means change and the question is always in which direction the changes need to happen. Currently innovations are mostly happening because stakeholders look at their own solutions and products and think about ways on how to improve them. This thinking is called system thinking which looks at a new product and it’s effect on competition, customers, financials, operations and considers opportunity costs.
Design Thinking puts end customers first
Design Thinking is a method to have the utmost focus on the end customer while interdependencies are not neglected completely but slip more into a background position. The objective of design thinking is very simple: Design products or services that solve customer needs first and bring customers the most value. Currently this is in most companies not the case. There are old-fashioned processes in place that just focus on improving or worst case just maintaining existing products.
Design Thinking is very much about empathy as it’s so user centric. It’s about gathering inspiration about the customer needs, create ideas for enabling new solutions, build prototypes and share them with users. At Accenture the process comprises 6 stages including discovery of ideas, description, ideation, prototyping, testing and implementing.
Design Thinking Methodology
Design Thinking is at the heart of Customer, Business, and Technology. A manufacturer would bring together personas from business side (sales representatives and marketers) together with R&D (engineers and software experts) and key customers. Based on this they will need to find a representative customer that can describe the needs in as much detail as possible and serve as a reference for this customer group. Co-Creation is a key factor in Design Sprints.
Design centric companies outperform the market
Companies that apply design thinking in their strategy and innovation processes do better than the market. Those companies are the likes of Apple, Amazon, Coca-Cola, IBM, Target, Ford, Starbucks do outperform the S&P 500 by over 200% in the past 10 years according to DMI Design Value Index.
Design Thinking in IoT
Design thinking lives from empathy, imagination, intelligence and hands on attitude. It can be pictured by the designers sense and methodology of building something that provides value to customers and thus opportunity for enterprises. Especially in the IoT environment most companies only think about their products and about their direct customers which are in the majority other businesses. However, when applying design thinking principles they would rather need to think about their customers customers and have a more end-to-end oriented approach.
