Is Design Thinking the "new" Outsourcing?

In the article “Design Thinking for Social Innovation”, the co authors Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt  describe the design thinking process through three “spaces”: inspiration, ideation and implementation. At first, they offer several examples showing successes and failures of design thinking and how non profits are increasingly using it to find solutions to social problems. We can see that it is a learning curve for companies through the example of the community treatment center in Hyderabad, India and how the designers of the treatment center did not take enough into account the culture of the local community. They will most likely take culture and the local needs more into consideration for their future projects. In general, more and more businesses are adopting design thinking as it can result in quick innovations and fast revenues as the product is offered in the market relatively quickly. (Brown T. ,Wyatt J.)

While making further research on design thinking, I stumbled upon an interview featuring Roger Martin, author of the Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the next competitive advantage. I found interesting that Roger Martin believes that design thinking is a competitive advantage. (Green) If we take Michael Porter’s definition of competitive advantage, “a function of either providing comparable buyer value more efficiently than competitors (low cost), or performing activities at comparable cost but in unique ways that create more buyer value than competitors and hence, command a premium price (differentiation)”, we could argue that design thinking is either low cost or differentiation. (The Economist) I believe that Design Thinking combines some characteristics of both as not only does it involves delivering a product at a lower cost but also to offer benefits that are better than its competitors. In the example mentioned earlier of the Naadi Foundation in Hyderabad, the designers looked for an efficient, effective low-cost process to distribute water to the local community while offering more benefits than the “competitor”, the always-open local borehole. 

Furthermore, while reading the article I asked myself, could Design Thinking be the “new” outsourcing? The business strategy of outsourcing was very popular as it gave the opportunity for companies to focus solely on some core activities. However, in the article “Design Thinking for Social Innovation”, the coauthors state that “to achieve divergent thinking, it is important to have diverse group of people involved in the process” hence this concept partly opposes the idea of outsourcing. Will companies now switch from outsourcing to Design Thinking?

Articles sited

Brown Tim, Wyatt Jocelyn "Design Thinking for Social Innovation" Stanford Social Innovation Review (2010)

http://ssir.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation

Green, Sara "Applying Design Thinking to Your Business." Harvard Business Review

https://hbr.org/2009/11/applying-design-thinking-to-yo

The Economist "Competitive Advantage". The Economist (August 2008)

http://www.economist.com/node/11869910