Innovation Through Design Thinking

In the video the speaker is talking about his company and how they use "Design Thinking". Design thinking is supported by a rich set of tools, process, roles and environment. These days designs are every where. Designs can be used to tackle a whole range of creative and business issues. Different companies use design to do different things. Design can be used to create new strategies, enter into new markets, create new brands, create new applications for technology, new ways to connect to customers and create new partnerships. There are three important phases to create a new design. The first phase is inspiration. Designers look at other people and try to see things in their point of view. During this stage the designer needs to have empathy for that person. The next phase is ideation. In this stage they build prototypes to evolve your idea and to learn about the idea. The last phase is implementation. In this phase they you use you try out your idea in the real world. They use story boards and models to see if they idea will work out in real life scenarios. They could use a knowledge management to post their ideas and prototypes and people then could then collaborate and give feedback. It could also help them go back to the prototype later on if it didn’t work and maybe add things to it later. The system could be a structure that held all of their ideas and information about their ideas. This would be better then having an idea wall where they post new ideas on a clipboard and it gets cluttered from paperwork.

Democratizing Innovation

In the video the speakers talks about "Democratizing Innovation", which means that users are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. He started to research where innovations began so he went to different manufacturers and asked them who came up with this model. All of them told him that the company came up with this idea but throughout his research he found out that most of the innovations were created by users. Actually 80 percent of innovations are created by users and 20 percent is from manufacturers. There is a difference between user innovations and manufacturer innovations. A user innovation is when the developer expects to benefit by using it. A manufacturer innovation is when the developer expects to benefit by selling it. Innovating users tend to be "Lead Users." They have needs that foreshadow general demand in the marketplace and they expect to obtain high benefit from a solution to their needs. So most user-centered innovations can increase social welfare.

Knowledge management can help bring numerous user innovators together so they can communicate and collaborate on different ideas. It can also help manufacturers as well. Some innovations created by manufacturers are not as good and don't last long. If manufacturers created an innovation and placed it on a site where users could collaborate and provide ideas that would make the innovation better and more successful, it could help manufacturers out a great deal. It also could help society as well.