Measuring Design Thinking Impact On Innovation

I usually say this, "You use creativity to solve personal problems, whilst you innovate when you want to solve problems together."

Each of us is endowed with innate creative potentials although it has to be intentionally supported to grow them. A recent continuous study from Dr George Land's 1963 which was revisited in 2023 confirming that young children exhibits high level of creativity. As we age, the creativity parts of our brain becoming more complex and structured, hence reducing creativity output (and innovation output).

Whilst as much as 98% children age 3-5 years old scored high level of creativity, by the time we hit age 15 years old the number drops to 12%, and to only 2% at the age 25 years old and above.

Enter design thinking.

Design thinking is an iterative methodology or approach to creativity and problem solving which is key ingredients to innovation. Basically, you can't achieve an appropriate innovation impact without creativity and solving problems.

There are many roads to design thinking.

In some organizations, they "invent" their own methods to design thinking to make proprietary and scalable within the organization. Some combine it with other complementary tools such as Lean Startup to make it useful and meaningful to address their business needs.

How long should your design thinking program be? It depends on your business objectives.

Here are 7 examples of business objectives that can be used for your design thinking and innovation adventure:

1. Drive Business Growth: Create innovative offerings that open up new revenue streams or expand existing ones, aligning design efforts directly with business growth objectives.
2. Increase Employee Engagement and Retention: Empower employees by involving them in the creative process, making their work more engaging and ownership over outcomes.
3. Accelerate Product Development: Use rapid prototyping and iterative testing to speed up time-to-market for products and services.
4. Foster Innovation Culture: Promote a culture of creativity and experimentation within the departments and organization, encouraging teams to think beyond conventional methods and explore new possibilities.
5. Acknowledging Market Changes and Trends: Develop agility in understanding to changing market conditions, using design thinking to iterate quickly based on real-time feedback and new insights.
6. Enhance Customer Experience: Develop solutions that are deeply aligned with customer needs and preferences to improve satisfaction and loyalty.
7. Improve Problem-Solving Efficiency: Introduce teams with basic design thinking tools to approach existing business challenges and appreciate the outcomes generated.

How to know which types of business challenges you can use design thinking for? Actually design thinking methodology can be used as a good starter for ANY challenges at all.

Here are the Ten Types of Innovation to stir up the pot.

Now, from design thinking to innovation, what you need to measure?

Innovation takes a long time to materialize, although it always start with a spark of idea. For example the Post-It note took about 12 years to become commercialized.

Microsoft under Satya Nadella took about 5 years to see the needle in the organizational culture move. Typically a pharmaceutical company invested easily about 5-6 years before hitting the market with the right solutions. Tesla took about 5 years since founded to release the first electric car, Roadster in 2008.

Many of these companies are still innovating, continuously. Simply because the customers are changing, the technololgy is evolving and new problems to solve come from all places.

Building prototypes is cumbersome. Many innovators desire the implementation yet undermine the functional benefits of prototyping especially 3D prototyping. The least they do usually presenting power point slides which I usually rejected as prototype.

Another good way to prototype is storyboarding. This is another fun way to visualize the problems you try to solve, showing what the solutions look like and inviting your audience to interact in comment and feedback. We prototype to learn, not to implement; yet.

Using a hypothetical healthcare company, here are some measurements you could consider in when using design thinking to help your innovation growth:

Case Study 1: Healthcare Innovation; Improving Patient-Centered-Care Solutions Via Empathy

• Context: A hospital launched a design thinking initiative to develop new patient-centered care solutions. The focus was on increasing empathy among employees and developing solutions based on patient feedback.
• The Learners: Mixed group of healthcare professionals; doctors, specialists and nurses (voluntary participation) around 30 learners (split into 2 groups)
• Empathy Development: Run a Pre-survey to gauge the level of understanding of what is empathy in patient-centered environment. Another Post-survey to gauge improvement. Any improvement of 15% and above is considered Good.
• Ideas Then Build Prototypes: From the brainstormed ideas and challenges, learners are group to work on desired patients category. They later build suitable prototypes for testing
• User Feedback Testing: Conducted 4-5 user testing sessions per prototype, integrating 50%-80% of patient feedback into design iterations. The purpose is to find out when possibilities of implementation when testing. Total 20 prototypes and 60 respondents.
• Long-term Adoption: Ideas and prototypes that receive good feedback will be implemented and monitored. Within 12 months, 50% of ideas from the group are implemented in various departments and more learners are recruited to learn and adopt the design thinking approach, and patient satisfaction scores across services is targeted to improve between 10%-20%.

Case Study 2: Financial Services Firm's Cultural Transformation Initiative

• Context: A financial services firm aimed to transform its internal culture using design thinking to foster collaboration and innovation. The initiative focused on training employees and building cross-departmental teams.
• The Learners: Mixed group of executives, managers and senior leaders. Total 400 learners (split into 22 groups)
• Measurements and Achievements:Skill Development: Post-program assessments showed a 28% improvement in employees innovation and problem solving skills (using design thinking), with creative confidence scores increasing from 5.5 to 8.5 (full scale 10).
• Collaboration and Team Dynamics: Achieved an 90% score in EOS surveys, showing high collaboration quality. Conflict resolution was effective, with 80% of conflicts resolved within 20-30 minutes during workshops.
• Impact on Organizational Metrics: New initiatives launched using design thinking increased by 60%, and revenue growth from these initiatives targeted at 20% within 2 years.

Other measurement that you could consider are:

1. Explore more than 2-3 business challenges.
2. Increase number of ideas generated per team. From 5 to 20 in 10 minutes.
3. Increase number of prototypes built. Each team to build 5-8 prototypes in 45 minutes.
4. Get other team to build prototypes for each other. This is fun!
5. Ensure field testing is done with many types of respondents. Number of respondents is between 4-10 people per group.
6. Measure the iteration cycle for each prototype from each team. The refinement should be documented as evidence of progress.
7. Organize pitching session where learners get to showcase what they have done and feedbacks received from POVs.
8. Track number of ideas that go into actual implementation for the next 3-6 months. Measure impact after 6-12 months of implementation. Poor results of impact shouldn't be seen as failure alone. Take learning vigorously.
9. Track learners learning objectives (instead of just engagement) in Pre-Post surveys. Just be mindful with the numbers return. Each person respond differently to stress and pressure.
10. Conduct qualitative interview with learners as Post-program initiative to refine future program improvements and quality.

Action not perfection!

Reach out to us DT LEADERSHIP to assist your workforce in developing productive innovation habits, change to innovation mindset, develop innovation culture, use innovation as catalyst to incite new ideas, augment learning organization and facilitate boards and top management to discuss strategic innovation.

https://linktr.ee/dtleadership

Hope this sharing tickles a little bit! Brickbats please reach out anytime :)