FOREWORD

Our world is increasingly complex and difficult to interpret. Multiple forces—technological, regulatory, competitive, and so on—act on a given context to shape the rules of what is possible and probable. Uncovering the most valuable opportunities is increasingly challenging for innovators, especially those using a traditional tool kit. New product development processes typically churn out incremental, me-too solutions when more substantial innovation is needed to capture competitive advantage.

Delivering predictable, consistent, and meaningful value from innovation remains a top challenge for executives, but most find the challenge too difficult to crack. Instead companies essentially give up and rely on pure serendipity to stumble upon valuable “eureka” moments, while others default to various versions of a creative process with the hope that it will yield a great outcome. Although these approaches can certainly yield success, the repeatability needed by any large organization is quite low.

This book presents an alternative to the status quo, an alternative that some leading-edge companies have begun to adopt. Design thinking can weed through the uncertainty and anchor innovation on the fundamental drivers of customer behavior, their interactions with the surrounding ecosystem, their interactions with one another.

Although design thinking itself is not new, Idris presents a fresh look at the practical application of this competency within the modern enterprise seeking to improve its innovation performance. This book is not an academic exercise into the possibility of design but a pragmatic explanation of how design principles can be embedded into an organization to give it insight into valuable opportunities previously hidden from traditional ways of working.

This book presents a framework and way of working that accommodates the dynamism and uncertainty surrounding most decision making companies face today. It also shares a methodology on how to embed a new design thinking–based tool kit into a modern enterprise that will enable a new wave of collaboration, insight, and learning to improve the quality of decision making, the allocation of resources to the best opportunities, and ultimately the formation of a more consistent stream of value creation.

Idris challenges the philosophies that underpin the management regimes of the modern enterprise and offers an alternative that will allow companies to adapt to the forces that impact their internal and commercial performance.

This mode challenges the status quo and encourages:

• Flexibility over conformity
• Exploration of questions over answers
• Critical thinking over key assumptions
• Enablement of teams over organization structures
• A focus on doing over studying

An innovation-driven company must put a different set of capability at the core of its growth engine that puts both art and science into a commercial context. This requires organizational agility and a culture of learning. Design thinking can be an effective tool to enable both of these attributes to bloom within a company culture.

This book also offers a refreshing take on the need for economic viability and design to coexist in a complementary and symbiotic way. Too often is design used as an excuse for passing over economics that do not make sense. The mere aesthetic appeal of a new product or powerful emotional connection of a new service experience cannot be used to justify an unprofitable business proposition. The models presented in the following pages offer a compelling version of design that allows for the right balance of desirability, feasibility, and economic viability.

Apple, with all of its risk taking on product form, user experience, and design, also maintains a laser-like focus on cost control, efficiency, and profit. Delighting its customer at the end of the day is the engine that drives its hardware-centric business model. Without design, there would be no business model, and without the business model there would be no design.

The need for this integrative thinking has never been greater. Technology exponentially interconnects people, places, and objects in increasingly new ways. Understanding the nature of these interactions both at the physical and emotional level will be required to unlock the value of these complex relationships.

Idris sets the bar high for companies attempting to embed into their culture. However, the rewards for success as indicated seem well worth the investment.

—Erik Roth

Erik leads McKinsey’s Global Innovation Practice
and is a partner of the firm. He is the
coauthor of Seeing What’s Next: Using the
Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change.