Design Thinking – the best way to problem solving?

In my first weekly blog post I want to write about design thinking and how it can impact the process of finding a solution and the solution to the problem adherent itself.

First of, we need to think about what design thinking means. In the article „Design Thinking for Social Innovation“ by Tim Brown & Jocelyn Wyatt they define it as:

„Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insights in depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions.“ 

Therefore design thinking is a way to involve the consumer or buyer of a product respectively service from the beginning in the process of making it. The term also draws meaning from the word design itself, as design is a way of visualizing an idea or concept, „which helps achieve the item's designated objective(s)."[1]

The way design thinking works is mainly to find a intrinsic solution to the issue at hand. Instead of looking outside of your field for answers the basic approach is to look at the challenge and try to find "positive deviants" or other abnormalities that stick out.
First of all you observe your field and find out as much as possible that is relevant for the topic. From this you attempt to derive data that will help you finding an idea for a solution. Hence design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving. As an anthropologist this reminds me a lot to the way we try to understand different cultures. Ethnologist use fieldwork to gain inside information about a culture and thus have an emic perspective on it.

Since the resolutions found through design thinking are very unique to the context and issue that are at hand, it may not be always possible to transfer them to a similar problem. This means that you would have to start again with the process to attempt getting the best solution possible. Since this could be time (and money) consuming and it may not always be possible.
Therefore my question would be if design thinking is the best practise for problem solving or if there is another approach which would have more transferability and hence be easier to apply to different contexts, cultures and people?

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[1] http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/design.html