Ashu Arrey’s take on how you can create a strategy for guaranteeing that, innovation and creativity flourish in your organisation. According to the Jongo Hub founder, ”Design Thinking is the way forward to skyrocket African entrepreneurship ecosystem”.

Jongo Hub is an Innovation and Entrepreneurship development Social Enterprise, promoting high Impact Entrepreneurship for transformation in Africa.

Design thinking played a fundamental role and hugely contributed to the success of Silicon Valey multi-billion companies. A business who has a zero regard for innovation will perish in no time. To Ashu Arrey, design thinking should be incorporated into company policies.

Is Design Thinking the Ultimate Strategy for Innovation?

When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Design-led companies such as Apple, Coca-Cola, IBM, Nike, Procter & Gamble and Whirlpool have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 10 years by an extraordinary 219%, according to a 2014 assessment by the Design Management Institute.

Great design has that “wow” factor that makes products more desirable and services more appealing to users.

Due to the remarkable success rate of design-led companies, design has evolved beyond making objects. Organisations now want to learn how to think like a designer and apply design principles to the workplace itself. Design thinking is at the core of effective strategy development and organisational change.

“Design-thinking firms stand apart in their willingness to engage in the task of continuously redesigning their business…to create advances in both innovation and efficiency—the combination that produces the most powerful competitive edge.”
—Roger Martin, author of the Design of Business

“Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent—not how things are but how they might be—in short, with design…Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
—Herbert Alexander Simon, Nobel Prize laureate (1969)

You can design the way you lead, manage, create and innovate. The design way of thinking can be applied to systems, procedures, protocols, and customer/user experiences. The purpose of design, ultimately, in my view, is to improve the quality of life for people and the planet.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems and find desirable solutions for clients. A design mindset is not problem-focused, it’s solution focused and action oriented towards creating a preferred future. Design Thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be—and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user (the customer).

“Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
– Tim Brown CEO, IDEO

Distinctions Between Design and Design Thinking

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs

“Design is the action of bringing something new and desired into existence—a proactive stance that resolves or dissolves problematic situations by design. It is a compound of routine, adaptive and design expertise brought to bear on complex dynamic situations.”
—Harold Nelson, The Design Way

Nigel Cross (2007), in his book Designerly Ways of Knowing, says, “Everything we have around us has been designed. Design ability is, in fact, one of the three fundamental dimensions of human intelligence. Design, science, and art form an ‘AND’ not an ‘OR’ relationship to create the incredible human cognitive ability.”

Science — finding similarities among things that are different Art — finding differences among things that are similar design — creating feasible ‘wholes’ from infeasible ‘parts’

It makes sense, therefore, to break out of the silos we have created in organisations and develop a cross-disciplinary inquiry to foster innovation.

A Framework for Design Thinking

This framework integrates classic creative problem-solving (CPS) with art and design methodologies.

Design thinking offers a structured framework for understanding and pursuing innovation in ways that contribute to the organic growth and add real value to your customers.

The design thinking cycle involves observation to discover unmet needs within the context and constraints of a particular situation, framing the opportunity and scope of innovation, generating creative ideas, testing and refining solutions.

Design thinking informs human-centered innovation

Human-centered innovation begins with developing an understanding of customers’ or users’ unmet or unarticulated needs.“The most secure source of new ideas that have a true competitive advantage, and hence, higher margins, is customers’ unarticulated needs,” says Jeanne Liedtka (Batten Briefings 2015), “Customer intimacy—a deep knowledge of customers and their problems—helps to uncover those needs.”

Design thinking minimises the uncertainty and risk of innovation by engaging customers or users through a series of prototypes to learn, test and refine concepts. Design thinkers rely on customer insights gained from real-world experiments, not just historical data or market research.

Develop design thinking capabilities in your organisation

You don’t have to be a designer to think like one. While learning to be a good designer takes years, you can think like a designer and design the way you lead, manage, create and innovate. Design begins with setting a strategic intention. If you are mapping out a strategy, you are designing.

Are you interested learning more about design thinking?

If yes then you’re fortunate this time! Jongo Hub shall be organising their third training session of design thinking in the Silicon Mountain of Buea.

The design thinking workshop will hold from the 24th to the 30th of July 2017 in Molyko Buea. An opportunity to learn how to make a difference in your projects, business, organisation and community. The 5days, evening course is a remarkable and transformational one.

To enroll

CONTACT
Jongo Hub at Check Point Molyko Buea. 677517951 email jongohub@gmail.com