Page 278 - Fundamentals of Management Myths Debunked (2017)_Flat

CHAPTER 8 • Managing Change and Innovation 277
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
48
for innovation what TQM did for quality.” 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 men-
tality, 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 those customer insights into
real and usable products. For instance, at Intuit, the company behind TurboTax software,
49
founder Scott Cook felt the company was “lagging behind in innovation.” So he decided to
apply design thinking. He called the initiative “Design for Delight,” and it involved customer
field research to understand their “pain points”—that is, what most frustrated them as they
worked in the office and at home. Then, Intuit staffers brainstormed (they nicknamed it “pain-
storm”) a wide array of possible ideas to address customer problems, which they would then
try out with customers to find ones that worked best. For example, one pain point uncovered
by an Intuit team was how customers could take pictures of tax forms to reduce typing errors.
Some younger customers, used to taking photos with their smartphones, were frustrated that
they couldn’t just complete their taxes on their mobiles. To address this, Intuit developed a
mobile app called SnapTax, which the company says has been downloaded more than a mil-
lion times since it was introduced in 2010. That’s how design thinking works in innovation.

MyManagementLab ®

Go to mymanagementlab.com to complete the problems marked with this icon .