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  The creative team at Hakuhodo, the Japanese advertising firm that created the Cool Biz campaign, experimented with another twist on the design challenge. The battery division of Panasonic had been struggling with its Oxyride battery, which is more powerful and longer lasting than a normal alkaline battery but is otherwise indistinguishable from its countless competitors. Rather than running a normal ad campaign promoting Oxyride’s technology, the Hakuhodo team posed a simple question: “Can man fly on the power of household batteries alone?”

  For four months a group of student engineers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology worked on the design and construction of a battery-powered, piloted airplane, while a TV show followed their progress and a Web site stoked public curiosity and built support for the team. At 6:45 on the morning of July 16, 2006, three hundred journalists turned up to watch as the plane took off from a makeshift runway and soared almost 400 meters (1,300 feet)—powered by 160 Oxyride AA batteries. All the Japanese news channels covered the flight, and the story found its way into international news services, including the BBC and Time. The event generated media coverage that Panasonic estimated to be worth at least $4 million, and Oxyride’s brand recognition jumped by 30 percent. Hakuhodo and Panasonic used a simple design challenge to turn advertising on its head. The aircraft even ended up in the National Science Museum—an honor not shared by the Energizer Bunny!

  A decade before the first battery-powered manned flight, the spaceflight activist Dr. Peter Diamandis used a dramatic design challenge to capture the public imagination and stimulate a major technological initiative. According to the terms of the first Ansari X Prize, announced in 1996, a nongovernmental team must build and launch a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the earth’s surface and repeat the feat within two weeks. The challenge was a huge success. Twenty-six teams from seven countries spent more than $100 million before SpaceShipOne, the team from Burt Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, won the prize on October 4, 2004. Since then, and in large measure due to the X Prize challenge, entrepreneurs have invested more than $1.5 billion in support of the private spaceflight industry. The X Prize Foundation has extended its program of “Revolution Through Competition” to superefficient cars, genomics, and landing robots on the moon. Numerous other organizations have followed Diamandis’s example.

  Design challenges are not only a great way to unleash the power of competition, they also create stories around an idea, transforming people from passive onlookers into engaged participants. People love the idea of following bands of adventurers as they compete to achieve the impossible. Reality TV has exploited this fascination with dubious results, but organizations such as the X Prize Foundation have shown how this same fascination can be mobilized to fulfill technological dreams and achieve profound humanitarian goals.

  from chasing numbers to serving humans

  Effective storytelling, as part of a larger campaign of using the element of time to advance an integrated program of design thinking, relies on two critical moments: the beginning and the end. At the front end, it is essential that storytelling begin early in the life of a project and be woven into every aspect of the innovation effort. It has been common practice for design teams to bring writers in at the end to document a project once it has been completed. Increasingly they are building them into the design team from day one to help move the story along in real time. At the far end, a story gains traction when it is picked up by its intended audience, who feel motivated to carry it forward long after the design team has disbanded and moved on to other projects.

  Among the many ways that the American Red Cross provides relief to the disadvantaged, one of the most important is large-scale donor blood collection. This volunteer-run organization goes to schools and workplaces and sets up a donor clinic for a day. In recent years the donor base has been shrinking, however, and the Red Cross decided to apply design thinking to the challenge of increasing the percentage of Americans donating blood from 3 percent of the population to 4 percent. This meant shifting the question from percentage points to a more human-centered focus: What are the emotional factors that lead people to donate blood or refrain from doing so? How might we improve the donor experience to make more people want to give blood?

  Together, the IDEO-Red Cross team explored various ways of making the temporary field clinics more comfortable for the donor and easier for the all-volunteer staff to set up and take down. Numerous practical ideas resulted from the effort—storage units that doubled as furniture, a system of mobile carts—but one detail expressed the new, human-centered orientation: in the course of repeated on-site observations, the design team noted that many people had strong personal motivations for giving blood—in memory of a lost family member or on behalf of a close friend whose life had been saved by a blood donation. The stories they told were powerful and often the reason why donors came back again and again and even recruited their friends and coworkers.

  The design team decided that better signage and more comfortable seating were less important than inviting people to share their stories and thus reinforce the emotional reasons for giving blood. Returning donors might feel that their private experiences were connected to something larger. New donors might learn something about the range of motivations behind this altruistic act. In the new experience, when donors check in they are given a card and invited to write a brief story about their reasons for wanting to give blood. Donors who wish to have their pictures taken can add their photograph to the card before it is posted on a board in the waiting area. What could be simpler than telling a story and sharing it with others, each of whom is there for a different reason but who are bound to one another by a common commitment?

  On the basis of promising results from a prototype set up in North Carolina, the American Red Cross is preparing to move forward with full-scale pilot programs in Minnesota and Connecticut.

  life after the thirty-second spot

  The sheer excess characteristic of our time—of goods, services, and information—is one reason for the declining success of conventional advertising. A second reason is that we ourselves are growing more complex and sophisticated. With access to greater volumes of information than could have been imagined by our parents’ generation, our judgments are more complex and our choices more discerning. One need only look at the hopelessly dated jingles and antics that enlivened the commercials of our childhoods to see how far we have come. It’s become impossible to sell a box of laundry detergent—much less communicate the urgency of an idea such as global warming—through a thirty-second spot.

  As a result, storytelling needs to be in the tool kit of the design thinker—in the sense not of a tidy beginning, middle, and end but of an ongoing, open-ended narrative that engages people and encourages them to carry it forward and write their own conclusions. Herein lies the success of the forceful story created by Al Gore and told in his Academy Award–winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth. By the end of the film the Nobel laureate, Academy Award winner, and self-described “former next president of the United States” presents the evidence of global warming to his viewers and challenges them to make it their own.

  “Design” is no longer a discrete stylistic gesture thrown at a project just before it is handed off to marketing. The new approach taking shape in companies and organizations around the world moves design backward to the earliest stages of a product’s conception and forward to the last stages of its implementation—and beyond. Allowing customers to write the last chapter of the story themselves is only one more example of design thinking in action.

  In each of the preceding chapters I have tried to identify techniques that originated in the design community—field observations, prototyping, visual storytelling—that lie at the center of a human-centered design process. In the course of these studies I have made two arguments: First, that it is time for these skills to migrate outward into all parts of organizations and upward into the highe
st levels of leadership. Design thinking can be practiced by everybody. There is no reason why everyone, up to and including the “C-level”—CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, and COOs—cannot master these thought processes as well.

  The second part of my argument will become clearer in the chapters that make up part two. It is that as design thinking begins to move out of the studio and into the corporation, the service sector, and the public sphere, it can help us to grapple with a vastly greater range of problems than has previously been the case. Design can help to improve our lives in the present. Design thinking can help us chart a path into the future.

  PART II

  where do we go from here?

  In the first part of this book we saw how business leaders, hospital administrators, university professors, and NGOs have begun to integrate the methods of the designer and, conversely, how designers have broadened their reach from the crafting of objects to the shaping of services, experiences, and organizations. Part two begins by looking at some case studies of what happens when the various elements of the design thinking methodology come together in an integrated, coordinated strategy.

  I then turn to what comes next: how can we apply this framework to the problems facing business and society today? We are at a critical point where rapid change is forcing us to look not just to new ways of solving problems but to new problems to solve.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  design thinking meets the corporation,

  or teaching to fish

  Since the early 1990s, Nokia has been the most consistently successful cell phone manufacturer in the world. Its products dominate markets from Munich to Mumbai and from Montreal to Mexico City. Nokia began as a paper mill in 1865 and through a sequence of investments moved from paper to rubber, cables, electronics, and ultimately mobile phones. A combination of technological prowess, organizational innovation, and top-notch industrial design kept Nokia ahead of the pack. In the last few years, however, the emergence of the mobile Internet has changed the rules of the game. In a growing number of markets it is no longer enough to have a snappy device with which to make a phone call or send a text. People want mobile information services, whether for searching maps or for networking with friends. Indeed, many customers in emerging countries will have their first Internet experience not on a PC but through a mobile handset. It is no longer the hardware that matters but the services and applications it delivers.

  Nokia saw this coming and in 2006 began to explore alternatives to its existing hardware-driven approach. Technologists, anthropologists, and designers were sent out into the world to understand how consumers were communicating, sharing information, and entertaining themselves and to look for what was missing. They found that people no longer simply wanted to make telephone calls. They wanted to express their creativity, to discover new things, and to share what they found with others. They also found that people were often forced to cobble together a variety of devices to make this happen. Nokia had all the components—three-megapixel cameras with high-quality Zeiss lenses, 3G and Wi-Fi network connectivity—but they were not integrated with services that could connect people in richer, more powerful ways.

  On the basis of these observations Nokia’s design teams brainstormed, prototyped, and explored a variety of new ideas that would enable the company to meet this need and seize this opportunity: mobile blogging, online gaming, photo sharing, location services, and time management. The teams presented these concepts to management in the form of stories from the field and future-oriented scenarios intended to show how these new services might be pulled together into a seamless experience that involved not just the phone but the Web and desktop.

  Under the new model, Nokia would continue to design and sell mobile handsets, but the design teams were proposing a radical new future in which hardware ceased to be the company’s offering and became the platform for a richly interactive, service-based business. Barely a year later, Nokia announced Ovi, a new service offering that could be accessed through any of its multimedia devices. Design thinking had enabled Nokia not only to explore new possibilities but also to convince itself that these possibilities were sufficiently compelling to move away from its strongly entrenched and previously successful approach. The timing was right. Today Ovi is one of the operating business divisions of the company, and Nokia—a technology leader—has reinvented itself as a service provider.

  The rethinking of Nokia’s business strategy did not come out of nowhere. To the contrary, its origins lie in a sweeping reassessment of the role of technology that has been under way since the end of World War II.

  design thinking as a systematic approach to innovation

  In 1940, during the darkest hours of the Battle of Britain, the celebrated film director Humphrey Jennings rallied the nation with an inspiring newsreel documentary entitled “London Can Take It!” Six years later the war was over and democracy had prevailed. As Great Britain’s battered economy struggled to recover, the Council of Industrial Design rose to rally the nation, this time with an ambitious exhibition called “Britain Can Make It.” The sprawling exhibition, which covered 90,000 square feet at the Victoria and Albert Museum, foreshadowed how developed nations would take advantage of wartime breakthroughs in everything from electronics to ergonomics to revive consumer demand.

  The wartime emergency led to massive and unprecedented government investment. In the postwar era, the initiative passed to the private sector. R&D labs flourished in every industry—from agriculture to automobiles and from textiles to telecommunications—staffed with the graduates of the technical universities of the United States, Europe, and Japan. Major expositions such as the Festival of Britain of 1951 and the sequence of World’s Fairs that followed reaffirmed the belief that science would answer all our questions and technology would translate them into goods to satisfy every need.

  The steady growth of corporate R&D labs, from barely 25,000 employees in the United States in 1958 to more than 1 million today, was a striking feature of the business landscape during the postwar decades. Geographically concentrated centers of technical innovation began to emerge along Route 128 in Massachusetts, in Cambridge in England, in the suburbs of Tokyo, and ultimately in the most successful of them all, northern California’s Silicon Valley. The first sector to show results was the manufacturing of consumer goods. Then came computer and communications hardware, software applications, and the Internet, each of which has taken on the mantle of driving economic growth. Research and development became the pathway to competitive success.

  Increasingly, however—as the example of Nokia shows—large companies are finding that a sole reliance on technical prowess is less effective in today’s market than it once was. Some of the great R&D labs, such as Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Bell Labs have either disappeared altogether or lost the privileged status they once had. Many companies have shifted the horizon of their research programs from long-term basic research to shorter-term applied innovation.

  This is not necessarily a bad thing. Small technology-driven companies and innovation-minded start-ups often have an advantage over larger, more established businesses. As the “desirability-feasibility-viability” triad suggests, a company that comes at innovation from the direction of technical feasibility will have to adjust the other factors in response to whatever discoveries it makes. The ultimate business model for a new company may not be obvious at the outset, and in such a case flexibility and adaptability are an enormous asset. Google discovered the power of connecting search to advertising only after it had been in business for a while. It was the fledgling Apple Computer, not the mighty Xerox Corporation, that was able to bring Xerox’s own research into computer interfaces to the market in the form of the Mac desktop icons and the mouse.

  Large companies are better positioned to look for breakthroughs from within their existing markets, where technical virtuosity provides no assurance of success. It may make better sense to drive innovation from a consumer-cente
red perspective that allows them to exploit assets they already possess: a large customer base, recognized and trusted brands, experienced customer service and support systems, wide distribution and supply chains. This is the human-centered, desirability-based approach that design thinking is ideally suited to enhance. It has helped established companies as diverse as Procter & Gamble, Nike, ConAgra, and Nokia avoid overrelying on technology and gambling on the big hit.

  using design thinking to manage an innovation portfolio

  In an organization with its share of oddballs, IDEO’s Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Jacoby stand out. Like most of their colleagues, Diego and Ryan have strong design credentials, but each of them also holds an MBA. For a long time we avoided hiring business school graduates—not because they weren’t smart or might show up at brainstorms wearing suits but because we figured they would have a hard time adjusting to the divergent, synthesis-based methods design thinking demands. We have had to reconsider that idea.

  For one thing, the MBA curriculum at many institutions now grapples with the theory and practice of innovation, and a growing number of their graduates are drawn to the kinds of problems designers address. There are even a few places—the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto—where business school students work directly on design projects. And at least one institution—the California College of the Arts in San Francisco—is taking seriously Tom Peters’s widely reported announcement that “the MFA is the new MBA” and offers an MBA in design strategy alongside its programs in painting, printmaking, and photography. There is now a critical mass of business school graduates whose training has prepared them for the unconventional practices of design thinking.