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    Design Thinking Competitive Advantage

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    70 views3 pages

    Design Thinking Competitive Advantage

    Uploaded by

    alsndrte
    Design Thinking Competitive Advantage

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 3

    When Everyone

    Is Doing Design
    Thinking, Is It Still
    a Competitive
    Advantage?
    by Tim Brown

    Design thinking has come a long way since I wrote about


    it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world
    places design at the center of everything it does. Design-
    ers are on the founding team of countless disruptive
    startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and
    government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build
    more nimbly with a human-centered focus.

    Adapted from content posted on HBR.org on August 27, 2015

    COPYRIGHT 2015 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
    Now that design thinking is everywhere, its tempting
    to simply declare it deadto ordain something new in its
    place. Its a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen
    innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart
    way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of
    tools that can grow old with us. And Id argue that in or-
    der to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses
    must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.
    Adapting from William Gibson, the future of design
    thinking is here, its just not evenly distributed. Some
    complex and large-scale systems are adopting the prac-
    tice in holistic ways. The Innova School System, for ex-
    ample, with 23 schools thus far, is applying design think-
    ing across its platform, from how the classrooms are
    built to the curriculum. Likewise, the UKs Design Policy
    Unit has shown how taking an agile, iterative approach
    across a broad range of government services can make
    the whole system feel more open, transparent, and easy
    to participate in.
    But I can count such examples on one hand, and that
    unevenness in distribution is due to a lack of creative
    mastery. For organizations that havent invested in a sus-
    tained way, the end results can be incremental and short-
    lived. Customer satisfaction and sales might see a bump,
    but incremental ideas are easy to copy. True competitive
    advantage requires non-obvious solutions executed in
    elegant ways.
    One company thats going for creative mastery is
    Umpqua. When the bank acquired Sterling Financial
    Corporation over a year ago, doubling its size and creat-
    ing the West Coasts largest community bank overnight,

    2
    When Everyone Is Doing Design Thinking

    CEO Ray Davis seized the moment to reinvest in design


    thinking across the organization. Umpqua created and
    set up an exhibition at its headquarters in Portland, Or-
    egon, focused on designing human-centered experiences,
    products and technological tools. Teams large and small,
    from executives to associates, walked through the exhibit,
    and Davis invited them to sign their names at the end
    only if they sincerely believed in the approach. Company
    evangelists handed out Moleskines with tips on how to
    be better-makers, and an internal tool (built on IDEOs
    OI Engine) helps teams master design thinking through
    open-platform challenges. Design thinking even shows
    up in the questions asked during reviews, when employ-
    ees are evaluated on how successfully theyre building its
    principles into everyday work.
    Getting to that kind of mastery is our challenge for the
    next decade. How might organizations build deep design
    thinking skills and creative leadership at all levels? Lucky
    for us, there are a host of resources to turn to: Udacity and
    Khan Academy, executive training at the d.School and
    Rotman, and new courses offered at our own IDEO U.
    Whenever Im faced with a tough business challenge,
    rather than trying to use some prescribed CEO logic,
    I tackle it as a design problem. Thats not an inborn abil-
    ity, its a skillOK, a masterylearned over many years
    of doing.

    Tim Brown is the CEO and president of the international


    design consulting firm IDEO and the author of Change
    by Design (HarperBusiness, 2009).

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