Design thinking | EPFL Graph Search

Design thinking refers to the set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by designers in the process of designing, and to the body of knowledge that has been developed about how people reason when engaging with design problems. Design thinking is also associated with prescriptions for the innovation of products and services within business and social contexts. Background Design thinking has a history extending from the 1950s and '60s, with roots in the study of design cognition and design methods. It has also been referred to as "designerly ways of knowing, thinking and acting" and as "designerly thinking". Many of the key concepts and aspects of design thinking have been identified through studies, across different design domains, of design cognition and design activity in both laboratory and natural contexts. The term design thinking has been used to refer to a specific cognitive style (thinking like a designer), a general theory of design (a way of underst

Human-centered Innovation Processes

Alan Cabello Llamas

For more than a decade managers, academics, educators and politicians have indicated that innovation is the key to our future. As a result, we find a plethora of innovation initiatives around the world, from university curricula to the mission statements of banks. This push to innovate is a direct result of the recent economic downturn as well as from an ever more competitive, connected and dynamic world. In order to remain relevant in such a world, emphasis is given to generating new ideas that may lead to new products and services. Despite these initiatives, evidence indicates that investment in innovation does not correlate with success. Although the goal of innovation is clear, the processes whereby that goal may be accomplished are varied and not entirely understood. The motivation of this thesis, therefore, is to gain a better understanding of some of those innovation processes. In recent years, a growing number of firms, organizations and governments have adopted an approach to innovation that is referred to as âDesign Thinkingâ. They use the term to describe the process by which a multifunctional team tackles a problem by exploring the underlying needs of the people most affected by that problemâwhether that be customers, users, etc.âthen, based on these observations, defines the root cause or key elements of the problem and finally attempts to resolve it through an active cycle of ideating, prototyping and testing potential solutions. While the process itself is well defined and understood, its implementation and use by managers in the context of innovation management calls for further exploration. With this objective, I first conducted research within academic literature, followed by an ethnographic study focused on the use of Design Thinking by both large firms and entrepreneurial teams. The first paper of this dissertation examines the different elements in the Design Thinking process within the context of management research. The goal of the first conceptual article is thus to establish the common ground among diverse subfields of research in management upon which future research in Design Thinking may build. The second paper of this dissertation aims to uncover how large firms use Design Thinking as an approach to innovation. Based upon direct observation and interview data we find evidence of links between Design Thinking and Absorptive Capacity. We therefore propose that Design Thinking may be a helpful tool for firms who wish to innovate by an increase in their Absorptive Capacity. The third and final paper of this dissertation aims to understand the effects of Design Thinking on the venture creation process. This work is based on ethnographic research conducted at Stanford University wherein twelve teams participated in an accelerator program that uses a Design Thinking approach with the goal of creating and launching new ventures. Building on Dynamic Capabilities literature, this research finds that the teams with greater capability to iterate their venture concept through repeated cycles of attachment and detachment relative to their proposed products or services tend to be more successful.

EPFL2015

Building Capabilities for Service Innovation

Andreas Felix von Vangerow

The service sector is the most dominant sector in every developed economy today. The ability to develop and successfully launch new services is crucial for service organizations to stay competitive and to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the environment. However, up until now, a mismatch remains between the importance of service innovation for society and the attention given to it in both academia and practice. Existing research has compared the innovative output of service firms with manufacturing firms and found that the difference is one of degree rather than of substance. Studies which focus on the process instead of the output of service innovation, however, are still relatively scarce. This dissertation aims to help close this research gap by examining three service innovation processes in different contexts. First, it offers a theoretical illumination of service innovation with the help of knowledge creation theory. This is beneficial for defining service innovation more precisely. The second study is concerned with the influence of emotional factors on the development of dynamic capabilities in new ventures. It shows that young ventures which are able to deliberately switch between emotional and analytical modes of operation have a higher likelihood of success. The study compares the development of two service-oriented ventures with two product-oriented ones that are part of an accelerator program at the School of Design Thinking at Stanford University. The third paper is concerned with product-service strategies, or Servitization, and the relation to vertical integration and the coordination of innovation in downstream markets. The study shows that the Servitization development, i.e. the vertical integration of manufacturing firms into its users' operation, is a response to the failure of architectural innovation in more flexible buyer-supplier relationships. The study finds four different strategies for the service business of manufacturing firms based on case studies in the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and chemical industries. Overall, I am able to show that firms need to be able to build three distinct capabilities to master their service innovation efforts. First, they need to build up a capacity for innovation to gain economies from partial repetition of solutions. Second, firms need to have skills in place to create and manage boundary objects, especially at the client interface. Finally, they need to have capabilities to build up complementarities which help protect revenues from their service innovation initiatives.

EPFL2015

Architectural Sampling: A Formal Basis for Machine-Learnable Architecture

Immanuel Chee Beng Koh

The spatial and formal conception of architecture, and thus its modes of design perception and representation, directly contributes to its machine-learnability; and consequently, its capacity in leveraging today's machine learning apparatus for design innovation. If text can be sampled and synthesized in Natural Language Processing, image in Image Processing and sound in Audio Signal Processing, how can architectural forms and spaces be likewise sampled for generating new designs? The thesis endeavours to construct such a theoretical and technical framework with the concept of architectural sampling -- defined as the exemplar-learning (pedagogical), the machinic encoding (technological) and probabilistic generation (aesthetical) of architectural forms. Foundational to this technical leap is the overcoming of architecture's own longstanding set of conceptual and perceptual assumptions, namely figure/ground, parts/whole and shapes/grammars; and replaced with one that is ontologically 'flattened', 'resolutional' and 'probabilistic'. The thesis samples precursory works from the history of architecture, alongside machine learning approaches, to build its theoretical claims; while algorithmically demonstrating and technically validating them through a series of design research projects organized according to their structural characteristics (grid, sequence and hierarchy). The contribution of the work lies in its fundamental reformulation of seeing, thinking and making architectural forms through the lens of machinic sampling.

EPFL2019

Building Capabilities for Service Innovation

Andreas Felix von Vangerow

EPFL2015

Human-centered Innovation Processes

Alan Cabello Llamas

EPFL2015