Turning an idea into a solution that adds value from an End User’s perspective.

Despite massive investments of management time and money, innovation remains a frustrating pursuit in many companies. Innovation initiatives frequently fail, and successful innovators have a hard time sustaining their performance—as verticals such as manufacturing, banking, mobile, FMCG, retail and countless others have found. 

What is innovation?

Design thinking is a human-cantered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success - Tim Brown

How design thinking fuels innovation

Design thinking is the set of principles that create a successful path to innovation and solve complex problems.

The relevance of Design Thinking as research method for Business Design is based on two very important aspects of the method. First of all, Design Thinking introduces "Empathy" into the equation. Empathy is the ability of the entrepreneur to see things through the eyes of the customer. Secondly, Design Thinking introduces "Creativity" into the equation. It is not enough that you can analyse the problem, you should also be able to come up with a solution to that problem and actually test the acceptance by your customers of that solution.

Without an innovation strategy, innovation improvement efforts can easily become a grab bag of much-touted best practices: dividing R&D into decentralized autonomous teams, spawning internal entrepreneurial ventures, setting up corporate venture-capital arms, pursuing external alliances, embracing open innovation and crowdsourcing, collaborating with customers, and implementing rapid prototyping, to name just a few. There is nothing wrong with any of those practices. The problem is that an organization’s capacity for innovation stems from an innovation system: a coherent set of interdependent processes and structures that dictates how the company searches for particular problems and solutions, synthesizes ideas into a business concept and product designs, and selects which projects get funded. Individual best practices involve trade-offs. And adopting a specific practice generally requires a host of complementary changes to the rest of the organization’s innovation system. A company without an innovation strategy won’t be able to make trade-off decisions and choose all the elements of the innovation system.

The first principle “DESIGN THINKING CYCLE “where you conceptualizing the idea and scope it out. After that you try to figure out as many solutions to that problem as you can imagine. Then you choose the most likely solution to be successful, you make a prototype of that solution and test its acceptance with your customers. Only after you have found a successful solution, you will invest in executing your business. 

The second principle “FOCUS ON END USER“ we’re no longer measured by the features and functions we ship. We’re measured by how well we fulfil our users’ needs.

The third principle “RESTLESS REINVENTION“ stay on your toes and treat everything as prototype. Human needs fundamentally don’t change. The ways we address them do.

The forth principle “DIVERSE EMPOWERED TEAMS“ usually great innovations require product teams to be better formed. Two major factors here ae diversity & empowerment.

The pace of change in most FMCG industries increasing rapidly and the level of competition is at a point where there are very few differences between products, mainly from functional prospective . Companies today need to learn the art of thinking on feet and solutions which are outside the abilities of algorithms. Companies in a supply chain are ones that need to start thinking how design thinking is bring change in their manufacturing department by increasing the efficiencies in production and how their sales team will increase the revenue. Design thinking & innovation shall not be limited to a individual, its for the whole organization to adopt it.You might ask me where do we begin?

Design thinking needs to embraced by whole organization , which requires workshops to get employees trained on design thinking and bring in concept of looking at innovation from different angles like user experience, technology cutting edge, marketing & strategy around it.

Design thinking is a part of innovation and hence cannot be limited to a team . Product innovation happens either in R&D or the design phase, teams based in these areas will be epicentre of the change/innovation .

Design thinking is being applied successfully at two levels into the organisational strategies - as an approach to bringing a culture shift which eventually would impact everyday challenges, and as a incremental change-driving innovation platform enabler. While doing so, it brings in an approach shift from the conventional management practices and thereby pushes for newer targets to be looked upon. 

Lets look at Media agencies today. They are given a product by client, for which they come up with consumer research and figure out what's going on around the product. Next steps is to position or lie about the product in a way that it answers all the issues surrounding it. This doesn’t solve the problem as agency is never involved in their product innovation. Getting involved in early stage with your cultural and consumer research instructs a product so that you don’t have lie about it. The product is not only fulfilling the client needs but also close to the consumer requirements. The gap between the product deign teams and marketing teams needs to be shortened and they need to talk regularly during the product innovation.

Innovation is often mistaken as cool way of solving a problem rather than how well it fits with client's brand and challenges. Invest in your R&D and develop partnership with technology partners/ Emerging technologies. Sometimes you just a need to join the dots to come out of with an amazing product. You need conception teams which are well aware of merging technologies and business processes in order to solve the problem. Without the process and people to explore the initial ideas/opportunities, we would not be able to go to that next level and change the thinking or consideration around what can be done in an impactful way for our clients.Innovation cannot be done to just do something cool, it must have a purpose. Innovation must be planned for. If it isn’t, it will often fall short.

Consumer touch point often end up creating loads of data. IOT has allowed this data to be captured quickly , allowing the emerging technology companies to come out with product / smart devices enabling clients to see consumer journey and sales. Now you can take pro active decisions on the campaign / Advert.

Innovation paves way for automation & efficiencies in lots of processes. Software & digital technology is changing the culture in way industries works. Companies are finding new ways not only to save costs but also to invest in new areas for growth of their business. In this age of every changing technology landscape we need to come out with innovation which allow industries to shorten the gap with their consumer and have better understanding of their needs. Innovation is happening at a PACE , don’t leave it too LATE.