Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works

Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can directly affect business results. Here they elaborate on the challenges they faced and the processes and tools they used, offering their personal perspectives and providing a clear path to implementation based on the principles and practices laid out in Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie's Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers.. Solving Problems with Design Thinking details 10 real-world examples of managers who successfully applied design methods at 3M, Toyota, IBM, Intuit, and SAP; entrepreneurial start-ups such as MeYou Health; and government and social sector organizations including the City of Dublin and Denmark's The Good Kitchen. Yet most managers lack a real sense of how to put this new approach to use for issues other than product development and sales growth. Using design skills such as ethnography, visualization, storytelling, and experimentation, these managers produced innovative solutions to problems concerning strategy implementation, sales force support, internal process redesign, feeding the elderly, engaging citizens, and the trade show experience

Average - content was not practical and did not live up to the marketing of the book At first I really liked this book. I had taken the online version of the course through a MOOC and found the approach novel. I am responsible for the continuous improvement initiative at my company and like to keep abreast of differing techniques to spark creativity. I was disappointed in that the example they use of the Danish food delivery system seems to be the 'gold standard' for design thinking. It surely was creative, however, I saw very few examples of other applications mentioned in the book as have been driven by the author or her network. I began to feel this was simply the author trying to market a proce. "Too many buzzwords" according to M. Heiss. It sounds, from the repeated author references, that the better book must be "Designing for Growth" by Lietzau and Ogilve. That book offers this approach, again, based on REPEATED references in THIS book:What is?What if?What wows?What works?This book offers very little. It represents a soft, social approach, and reinforces the idea that there is a decision making process/hierarchy that could probably withstand the burden of adding useless process majors to the team. Slow it down, add expense, what business WOULDN'T like that? The case studies aren't interesting or well written, and it's hard to tell if they are eve. "Good insights through case studies, but lacks metrics" according to Michael Gastin. Decent set of design-thinking case studies. It suffered from a lack of metrics, meaning it would have been nice to get an idea of the impact these projects had other than, "We got people really excited and talking about X" or "Now our whole team is committed to this approach." Those are fine, but I think for design thinking to be taken more seriously by the business community, it has to at some point demonstrate its value quantitatively. I would have given five stars if the case studies included proper measurement.