Design thinking and Managing Strategic Innovation

I attended an interesting two-day workshop last week (one day then and the first a month earlier) on Managing Strategic Innovation (MSI). It was hosted by the team of Jacob Jaskov and Brett Patching. These two guys are researchers into the field of innovation, strategy and strategic design at Danish School of Education, Insitute of Learning and the Aarhus School of Architecture’s Department of Design respectively. They are also innovation consultants and in particular Jacob Jaskov has a track-record of working with small and larger Danish businesses as e.g. Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company. The workshop was a small exclusive one with only 24 participants primarily from businesses, consultancies and myself from academia (and consulting – just call me, when needed).

It was interesting to see how a designerly approach to strategic questions was both approached and promoted, and at the same time constrained and refrained. The opening talk was circling around issues like wicked problems and iterative processes. However, based on their experience with introducing such notions into a stringent business context, the creative and exploratory processes were constrained by very rigorous process formats. So, as I posted on Twitter afterwards, does this mean that the creative and fun part of design is only 20% and structure is the last 80%, when dealing with innovation in business? Yes well, it does – at least 80%, looking more like 90 or 95% in the eyes of the MSI-guys.

The process we learned at the workshop seemed pretty efficient for developing new ideas and perspectives, and getting sufficient backing for these ideas and perspectives in research. Apart from this work process and collaboration format what I take from the workshop are a bunch of insights and interesting assumptions or issues-for-follow-up:

Is it necessary to pack design and the open, exploratory work-format of designers (design thinking) into rigorous structures for businesses to feel comfortable enough to engage with design thinking in strategic processes?

Is there actually a clash between designerly ways of going about a problem or issue on one side and the need for rigor on the other side? Exploring with design freely and managing structure strictly. Open vs. closed? Divergent vs. convergent thinking?

Is there still such a mistrust of design on corporate level when it comes to anything other than look-and-feel that we have to call it something else? The MSI-team has stopped talking about “strategic design” and is now only saying “strategic inquiry”, which omits the d.word, but then says almost nothing about the mode of inquiry. Can’t we get business people to understand the power of design thinking without calling it something else?

All these are very interesting questions to me, and if you are interested I can tell you more about the workshop, discuss the questions with you or just explore the potential of design thinking in general. I’m here and I’m ON the issue… (wish that you cold follow my twitter searching on the issue – it is very interesting)