Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Design Thinking for Social Innovation- A global innovation and design firm: IDEO


This week I ran into an interesting article by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt on the World Bank’s website. Tim Brown is the CEO and president of IDEO, a global innovation and design firm. Jocelyn Wyatt leads IDEO’s Social Innovation group, which works with enterprises, foundations, NGOs, and multinationals to build capabilities in design thinking and design innovative offerings that meet the needs of local customers.

According to them, designers have focused on the look and the functionality of products so far. Now they delve into the problems more deeply. Design thinking addresses the needs of the consumer and the infrastructure that enables it. This approach puts the human in the center and also, the process itself is also deeply human. Regarding the design thinking process, there are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Inspiration refers to the problem that motivates the search for solutions; ideation refers to generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation refers to the way that project applies to people’s lives.

Systemic solutions to systemic problems are needed. Many social enterprises use some aspects of design thinking, but not with all aspects. Sometimes the approach is not adopted by the entire organization due to fear of failure or the organization sometimes cannot balance the perspectives of users, technology, and organizations. A vibrant design thinking encourages prototyping as part of the creative process and not just as a way of validating ultimate ideas.

Design thinking leads many ideas and ultimately real-world solutions to create better outcomes for organizations and the people they serve. But we should think about the impacts of the social innovations on the future generations. Which one would have a better social outcome: improving the lives of today’s people or preserving the environment for the future generations? 

You can reach the whole article from the link below:

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