Fundamentals of Management, 11/e

How Does Design Thinking Influence Innovation?

We introduced you to the concept of design thinking in a previous chapter. Well, undoubtedly, there’s a strong connection between design thinking and innovation. “Design thinking can do for innovation what TQM did for quality.”51 Just as TQM provides a process for improving quality throughout an organization, design thinking can provide a process for coming up with things that don’t exist. When a business approaches innovation with a design thinking mentality, the emphasis is on getting a deeper understanding of what customers need and want. It entails knowing customers as real people with real problems—not just as sales targets or demographic statistics. But it also entails being able to convert ...