Abstract
This chapter (as well as the subsequent Chap. 3) sets up the conceptual framework to help us analyse the impact of DT on large organisations. This chapter explores the relationship between the challenges organisations face today, innovation and Design Thinking. People in large organisations are interested in Design Thinking because it promises innovation. But how do innovations emerge from Design Thinking? We argue that Design Thinking supports innovation because it helps tackle complex and uncertain challenges, also called ‘wicked problems’. These types of challenges have an uncanny way of evading resolutions. In an increasingly complex and uncertain world, this chapter argues, responses to wicked problems emerge from the interplay of different professional and disciplinary perspectives. We suggest, then, to think of innovations as those solutions that successfully and creatively bring together the different insights from a range of disciplines, perspectives and professions. This, we contend, is exactly what Design Thinking enables teams to do: it provides an effective method for mobilising a wide range of disciplines, professions and perspectives for solving wicked problems.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite being rather gloomy about the long-term prospects of capitalism (Schumpeter 2013).
- 2.
So in a way, Schumpeter concedes that Marx was right. The boom-and-bust of business cycles, the contraction and expansion of economies as well as the flourishing and decaying are an inextricable part of the dynamic evolution of capitalism. Where Marx went wrong, however, is that these business cycles are dysfunctional and move unerringly towards the fulfilment of some implicit historical telos, namely the advent of a socialist millennium.
- 3.
And yet, curiously, these institutions are also interested in Design Thinking.
- 4.
For all its considerable weaknesses, the Public Choice literature, most famously Anthony Downs’ ‘Inside Bureaucracy’, has conclusively shown that public and citizen sector organisations are subject to very similar utility-maximising and rent-seeking behaviour that defines economic actors.
- 5.
Another, probably more commonly used term for a frame is ‘world-view’.
- 6.
These types of responses have come to be known as ‘clumsy solutions’ (Verweij et al. 2006). They are called ‘clumsy’ solutions because they somewhat inelegantly incorporate what look like incompatible approaches and contending rationalities. We shall have more to say about the nature of these solutions in the following chapter.
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Ney, S., Meinel, C. (2019). Innovation, Wicked Problems and Design Thinking. In: Putting Design Thinking to Work. Understanding Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19609-7_2
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