The Landmarks to Innovation
One of my favourite interviews over the past few months was an exchange between Tim Brown, IDEO CEO, and Art Kleiner, author of The Age of Heretics. The Q&A in strategy+business focused on “design thinking” — why it leads to better innovation and how to encourage it in our organizations.
In the genius versus process innovation debate, Brown falls on the side of process. His point is that you don’t have to be creative to practise “design thinking,” which he defines as a combination of intuition and rational thought.
Here are the landmarks along the path of design thinking”:
- Produce the design brief: What question will you address?
- Observe the world in new ways: It’s not a question of getting a great idea out of your head. “The wonderful ideas come from noticing things and exposing yourself to the world in different ways.” The more you observe, Brown says, the more interesting your questions become.
- Find a systematic process for developing your insights. That might involve deliberate discussions on what comes out of your initial rough of thinking.
- Visualize your ideas. That means taking the time to make prototypes and redesign based on what you learn. According to Brown, “We need to get much more comfortable with building to learn, that is, making things to figure out what they should be, rather than to show how good they are.” Key indicator: how often are your senior managers looking at rough prototypes to see how ideas are evolving?
In his Q&A, Brown references examples from Amtrak, Virgin Airways, Shimano, IDEA, and Bank of America.
The Thought Leader Interview: Tim Brown, by Art Kleiner; strategy+business (Issue 56, Autumn 2009)
