作者：Tim Brown
出版社：HarperBusiness
副标题：How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
发行时间：2009年9月29日
来源：下载的 epub 版本

一年前参加 GDG 的活动，第一次了解到 Design Thinking，对这个概念一直朦朦胧胧的，作者 Tim Brown 是 IDEO 的现任 CEO，把 Design Thinking 的概念做了系统的梳理，非常的流畅，书的质量很高，所以经得起近10年的考验，难得的好书

Design Thinking 的三个均衡点：desirability（可消费）, feasibility（使用性）, viability（可行性），最适合的创新是在自己熟悉的市场，面对自己熟悉的用户群展开的，颠覆式创新往往因为没有这两个基础，所以特别有挑战

摘录：

What we need is an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective, and broadly accessible, that can be integrated into all aspects of business and society, and that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are implemented and that therefore have an impact. Design thinking, the subject of this book, offers just such an approach.
Design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many decades in their quest to match human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business. By integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems.
Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run a business based on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an overreliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as dangerous. The integrated approach at the core of the design process suggests a “third way.”

The very first products I designed as a design professional were for a venerable English machinery manufacturer called Wadkin Bursgreen. The people there invited a young and untested industrial designer into their midst to help improve their professional woodworking machines. I spent a summer creating drawings and models of circular saws that were better looking and spindle molders that were easier to use. I think I did a pretty good job, and it’s still possible to find my work in factories thirty years later. But you will no longer find the Wadkin Bursgreen company, which has long since gone out of business. As a designer I didn’t see that it was the future of the woodworking industry that was in question, not the design of its machines.
Only gradually did I come to see the power of design not as a link in a chain but as the hub of a wheel. When I left the protected world of art school—where everyone looked the same, acted the same, and spoke the same language—and entered the world of business, I had to spend far more time trying to explain to my clients what design was than actually doing it. I realized that I was approaching the world from a set of operating principles that was different from theirs. The resulting confusion was getting in the way of my creativity and productivity.
I also noticed that the people who inspired me were not necessarily members of the design profession: engineers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Edison, and Ferdinand Porsche, all of whom seemed to have a human-centered rather than technology-centered worldview; behavioral scientists such as Don Norman, who asked why products are so needlessly confusing; artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Antony Gormley, who seemed to engage their viewers in an experience that made them part of the artwork; business leaders such as Steve Jobs and Akio Morita, who were creating unique and meaningful products. I realized that behind the soaring rhetoric of “genius” and “visionary” was a basic commitment to the principles of design thinking.
A few years ago, during one of the periodic booms and busts that are part of business as usual in Silicon Valley, my colleagues and I were struggling to figure how to keep my company, IDEO, meaningful and useful in the world. There was plenty of interest in our design services, but we also noticed that we were increasingly being asked to tackle problems that seemed very far away from the commonly held view of design. A health care foundation was asking us to help restructure its organization; a century-old manufacturing company was asking us to help it better understand its clients; an elite university was asking us to think about alternative learning environments. We were being pulled out of our comfort zone, but this was exciting because it opened up new possibilities for us to have more impact in the world.
We started to talk about this expanded field as “design with a small d” in an attempt to move beyond the sculptural objet displayed in lifestyle magazines or on pedestals in museums of modern art. But this phrase never seemed fully satisfactory. One day I was chatting with my friend David Kelley, a Stanford professor and the founder of IDEO, and he remarked that every time someone came to ask him about design, he found himself inserting the word “thinking” to explain what it was that designers do. The term “design thinking” stuck. I now use it as a way of describing a set of principles that can be applied by diverse people to a wide range of problems. I have become a convert and an evangelist of design thinking.

Change by Design is divided into two parts. The first is a journey through some of the important stages of design thinking. It is not intended as a “how-to” guide, for ultimately these are skills best acquired through doing. What I hope to do is to provide a framework that will help the reader identify the principles and practices that make for great design thinking. As I suggest in chapter 6, design thinking flourishes in a rich culture of storytelling, and in that spirit I will explore many of these ideas by telling stories drawn from IDEO and other companies and organizations.
The first part of the book focuses on design thinking as applied to business. Along the way we will see how it has been practiced by some of the most innovative companies in the world, how it has inspired breakthrough solutions, and where, on occasion, it has overreached (any business book that claims an unbroken record of success belongs on the “fiction” shelf). Part two is intended as a challenge for all of us to Think Big. By looking at three broad domains of human activity—business, markets, and society—I hope to show how design thinking can be extended in new ways to create ideas that are equal to the challenges we all face. If you are managing a hotel, design thinking can help you to rethink the very nature of hospitality. If you are working with a philanthropic agency, design thinking can help you grasp the needs of the people you are trying to serve. If you are a venture capitalist, design thinking can help you peer into the future.

The risk of such an iterative approach is that it appears to extend the time it takes to get an idea to market, but this is often a shortsighted perception. To the contrary, a team that understands what is happening will not feel bound to take the next logical step along an ultimately unproductive path. We have seen many projects killed by management because it became clear that the ideas were not good enough. When a project is terminated after months or even years, it can be devastating in terms of both money and morale. A nimble team of design thinkers will have been prototyping from day one and self-correcting along the way. As we say at IDEO, “Fail early to succeed sooner.”

A second way to think about the overlapping spaces of innovation is in terms of boundaries. To an artist in pursuit of beauty or a scientist in search of truth, the bounds of a project may appear as unwelcome constraints. But the mark of a designer, as the legendary Charles Eames said often, is a willing embrace of constraints.
Without constraints design cannot happen, and the best design—a precision medical device or emergency shelter for disaster victims—is often carried out within quite severe constraints. For less extreme cases we need only look at Target’s success in bringing design within the reach of a broader population for significantly less cost than had previously been achieved. It is actually much more difficult for an accomplished designer such as Michael Graves to create a collection of low-cost kitchen implements or Isaac Mizrahi a line of ready-to-wear clothing than it is to design a teakettle that will sell in a museum store for hundreds of dollars or a dress that will sell in a boutique for thousands.
The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints is the foundation of design thinking. The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them. Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas: feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people).
A competent designer will resolve each of these three constraints, but a design thinker will bring them into a harmonious balance. The popular Nintendo Wii is a good example of what happens when someone gets it right. For many years a veritable arms race of more sophisticated graphics and more expensive consoles has been driving the gaming industry. Nintendo realized that it would be possible to break out of this vicious circle—and create a more immersive experience—by using the new technology of gestural control. This meant less focus on the resolution of the screen graphics, which in turn led to a less expensive console and better margins on the product. The Wii strikes a perfect balance of desirability, feasibility, and viability. It has created a more engaging user experience and generated huge profits for Nintendo.

A second approach is the one commonly taken by engineering-driven companies looking for a technological breakthrough. In this scenario teams of researchers will discover a new way of doing something and only afterward will they think about how the technology might fit into an existing business system and create value. As Peter Drucker showed in his classic study Innovation and Entrepreneurship, reliance on technology is hugely risky. Relatively few technical innovations bring an immediate economic benefit that will justify the investments of time and resources they require. This may explain the steady decline of the large corporate R&D labs such as Xerox PARC and Bell Labs that were such powerful incubators in the 1960s and ’70s. Today, corporations instead attempt to narrow their innovation efforts to ideas that have more near-term business potential. They may be making a big mistake. By focusing their attention on near-term viability, they may be trading innovation for increment.

The “Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest” competition is a good example. Google teamed up with the bike company Specialized to create a design competition whose modest challenge was to use bicycle technology to change the world. The winning team—five committed designers and an extended family of enthusiastic supporters—was a late starter. In a few frenzied weeks of brainstorming and prototyping, the team was able to identify a pressing issue (1.1 billion people in developing countries do not have access to clean drinking water), explore a variety of alternative solutions (mobile or stationary? trailer or luggage rack?) and build a working prototype: The Aquaduct, a human-powered tricycle designed to filter drinking water while transporting it, is now traveling the world to help promote clean water innovation. It succeeded because of the inflexible constraints of technology (pedal power), budget ($0.00), and inflexible deadline. The experience of the Aquaduct team is the reverse of that found in most academic or corporate labs, where the objective may be to extend the life of a research project indefinitely and where the end of a project may mean nothing more than the funding has dried up.

The classic starting point of any project is the brief. Almost like a scientific hypothesis, the brief is a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized: price point, available technology, market segment, and so on. The analogy goes even further. Just as a hypothesis is not the same as an algorithm, the project brief is not a set of instructions or an attempt to answer a question before it has been posed. Rather, a well-constructed brief will allow for serendipity, unpredictability, and the capricious whims of fate, for that is the creative realm from which breakthrough ideas emerge. If you already know what you are after, there is usually not much point in looking.

Karl Ronn, the head of R&D for P&G’s Home Care Division, was one of the first senior executives to see the potential of this approach. His stated goal was not to produce incremental additions to existing products and brands but to inspire innovation that would generate significant growth. This led him to IDEO with a brief that was the ideal mix of freedom and constraint: reinvent bathroom cleaning with an emphasis on what was enigmatically called “the everyday clean.” Ronn didn’t show up with the latest technology from the lab and instruct the team to package it in streamlines and tail fins. He didn’t ask us to grow an existing market by a couple of percentage points. Without making the brief too concrete, he helped the team establish a realistic set of goals. Without making it too broad, he left us space to interpret the concept for ourselves, to explore and to discover.
As the project progressed and new insights accumulated, it seemed advisable to adjust the initial plan by introducing additional constraints: a revised price point; a restriction that there be “no electric motors.” Such midcourse adjustments are common and are a natural feature of a process that is healthy, flexible, and dynamic. The modifications to the original brief helped Ronn to specify the level of cost and complexity that was appropriate for his business.
Simultaneously, these continual refinements of the initial plan helped guide the project team toward the right balance of feasibility, viability, and desirability. Over the course of about twelve weeks, this well-crafted brief led to a staggering 350 product concepts, more than 60 prototypes, and 3 ideas that advanced to development. One of them—Mr. Clean Magic Reach, a multifunctional tool that met every one of the stated criteria—went into production eighteen months later.
The message here is that design thinking needs to be practiced on both sides of the table: by the design team, obviously, but by the client as well. I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, “Give me the next iPod,” but it’s probably pretty close to the number of designers I’ve heard respond (under their breath), “Give me the next Steve Jobs.” The difference between a design brief with just the right level of constraint and one that is overly vague or overly restrictive can be the difference between a team on fire with breakthrough ideas and one that delivers a tired reworking of existing ones.

Although we will never, I hope, lose respect for the designer as inspired form giver, it is common now to see designers working with psychologists and ethnographers, engineers and scientists, marketing and business experts, writers and filmmakers. All of these disciplines, and many more, have long contributed to the development of new products and services, but today we are bringing them together within the same team, in the same space, and using the same processes. As MBAs learn to talk to MFAs and PhDs across their disciplinary divides (not to mention to the occasional CEO, CFO, and CTO), there will be increasing overlap in activities and responsibilities.
There is a popular saying around IDEO that “all of us are smarter than any of us,” and this is the key to unlocking the creative power of any organization. We ask people not simply to offer expert advice on materials, behaviors, or software but to be active in each of the spaces of innovation: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Staffing a project with people from diverse backgrounds and a multiplicity of disciplines takes some patience, however. It requires us to identify individuals who are confident enough of their expertise that they are willing to go beyond it.

To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions—the “T-shaped” person made famous by McKinsey & Company. On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome. This competence—whether in the computer lab, in the machine shop, or out in the field—is difficult to acquire but easy to spot. It may be necessary to sift through literally thousands of résumés to find those unique individuals, but it is worth the effort.
But that is not enough. Many designers who are skilled technicians, craftsmen, or researchers have struggled to survive in the messy environment required to solve today’s complex problems. They may play a valuable role, but they are destined to live in the downstream world of design execution. Design thinkers, by contrast, cross the “T.” They may be architects who have studied psychology, artists with MBAs, or engineers with marketing experience. A creative organization is constantly on the lookout for people with the capacity and—just as important—the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. In the end, this ability is what distinguishes the merely multidisciplinary team from a truly interdisciplinary one. In a multidisciplinary team each individual becomes an advocate for his or her own technical specialty and the project becomes a protracted negotiation among them, likely resulting in a gray compromise. In an interdisciplinary team there is collective ownership of ideas and everybody takes responsibility for them.

Design thinking is the opposite of group thinking, but paradoxically, it takes place in groups. The usual effect of “groupthink,” as William H. Whyte explained to the readers of Fortune back in 1952, is to suppress people’s creativity. Design thinking, by contrast, seeks to liberate it. When a team of talented, optimistic, and collaborative design thinkers comes together, a chemical change occurs that can lead to unpredictable actions and reactions. To reach this point, however, we have learned that we must channel this energy productively, and one way to achieve this is to do away with one large team in favor of many small ones.

Much effort has gone into the problem of remote collaboration. Videoconferencing, although invented in the 1960s, became widespread once digital telephony networks became technically feasible in the 1980s. Only recently has it begun to show signs of taking hold as an effective medium of remote collaboration. E-mail has done little to support collective teamwork. The Internet helps move information around but has done little to bring people together. Creative teams need to be able to share their thoughts not only verbally but visually and physically as well. I am not at my best writing memos. Instead, put me in a room where somebody is sketching on a whiteboard, a couple of others are writing notes on Post-its or sticking Polaroid photos on the wall, and somebody is sitting on the floor putting together a quick prototype. I haven’t yet heard of a remote collaboration tool that can substitute for the give-and-take of sharing ideas in real time.

Google has slides, pink flamingos, and full-size inflatable dinosaurs. Pixar has beach huts. IDEO will erupt into a pitched FingerBlaster war on the slightest provocation.
It’s hard not to trip over the evidence of the creative cultures for which each of these companies is famous, but these emblems of innovation are just that—emblems. To be creative, a place does not have to be crazy, kooky, and located in northern California. What is a prerequisite is an environment—social but also spatial—in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties. It does little good to identify the brightest T-shaped people around, assemble them in interdisciplinary teams, and network them to other teams if they are forced to work in an environment that dooms their efforts from the start. The physical and psychological spaces of an organization work in tandem to define the effectiveness of the people within it.
A culture that believes that it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas. If Gary Hamel is correct in arguing that the twenty-first century will favor adaptability and continuous innovation, it just makes sense that organizations whose “product” is creativity should foster environments that reflect and reinforce it. Relaxing the rules is not about letting people be silly so much as letting them be whole people—a step many companies seem reluctant to take. Indeed, the fragmentation of individual employees is often just a reflection of the fragmentation of the organization itself. I have observed many situations in which the supposedly “creative” designers are sequestered from the rest of the company. Although they may have a merry time off in their studios, this isolation quarantines them and undermines the creative efforts of the organization from opposite angles: the designers are cut off from other sources of knowledge and expertise, while everyone else is given the demoralizing message that theirs is the nine-to-five world of business attire and a sober business ethic. Would the U.S. auto industry have reacted faster to changes in the market if designers, marketers, and engineers had been sitting around the same table? Perhaps.
The concept of “serious play” has a long, rich history within American social science, but nobody understands it in more practical terms than Ivy Ross. As senior VP of design for girls’ products at Mattel, Ross realized that Mattel had made it difficult for the various disciplines across the company to communicate and collaborate. To address this she created Platypus, the code name for a twelve-week experiment in which participants from across the organization were invited to relocate to an alternative space with the objective of creating new and out-of-the-box product ideas. “Other companies have skunk works,” Ross told Fast Company. “We have a platypus. I looked up the definition, and it said, ‘an uncommon mix of different species.’”
Indeed, the species at Mattel could hardly have been more different: people came from finance, marketing, engineering, and design. The only requirement was that they commit themselves full-time to Platypus for three months. Since many of them had never been involved in new product development before and few had any kind of creative training, the first two weeks of the session were spent in a “creativity boot camp.” There they heard from a spectrum of experts about everything from child development to group psychology and were exposed to a range of new skills including improvised acting, brainstorming, and prototyping. During the remaining ten weeks they explored new directions for girls’ play and came up with a series of innovative product concepts. By the end they were ready to pitch their ideas to management.
Although it was located literally in the shadow of the company’s headquarters in El Segundo, California, Platypus created a space that challenged all of the corporate rules. Ross regularly brought new teams together and put them into an environment designed to let people experiment in ways they had never been able to in their normal jobs. As she predicted, many Platypus graduates went back to their respective departments determined to use the practices and ideas they had learned. They found, however, that the culture of efficiency to which they returned invariably made that difficult. More than a few became frustrated. Some ultimately left the company.

Over the course of their century-long history of creative problem solving, designers have acquired a set of tools to help them move through what I have called the “three spaces of innovation”: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. My argument is that these skills now need to be dispersed throughout organizations. In particular, design thinking needs to move “upstream,” closer to the executive suites where strategic decisions are made. Design is now too important to be left to designers.
It may be perplexing for those with hard-won design degrees to imagine a role for themselves beyond the studio, just as managers may find it strange to be asked to think like designers. But this should be seen as the inevitable result of a field that has come of age. The problems that challenged designers in the twentieth century—crafting a new object, creating a new logo, putting a scary bit of technology into a pleasing or at least innocuous box—are simply not the problems that will define the twenty-first. If we are to deal with what Bruce Mau has called the “massive change” that seems to be characteristic of our time, we all need to think like designers.
Just as I am challenging companies to incorporate design into their organizational DNA, however, I want to challenge designers to continue the transformation of design practice itself. There will always be a place in our dizzying world for the artist, the craftsman, and the lone inventor, but the seismic shifts taking place in every industry demand a new design practice: collaborative but in a way that amplifies, rather than subdues, the creative powers of individuals; focused but at the same time flexible and responsive to unexpected opportunities; focused not just on optimizing the social, the technical, and the business components of a product but on bringing them into a harmonious balance. The next generation of designers will need to be as comfortable in the boardroom as they are in the studio or the shop, and they will need to begin looking at every problem—from adult illiteracy to global warming—as a design problem.

The job of the designer, to borrow a marvelous phrase from Peter Drucker, is “converting need into demand.” On the face of it, this sounds simple: just figure out what people want and then give it to them. But if it’s so easy, why don’t we see more success stories like the iPod? The Prius? MTV and eBay? The answer, I’d suggest, is that we need to return human beings to the center of the story. We need to learn to put people first.
Much has been written about “human-centered design” and its importance to innovation. Since there are so few truly compelling stories, however, it’s time to ask why it is so difficult to spot a need and design a response. The basic problem is that people are so ingenious at adapting to inconvenient situations that they are often not even aware that they are doing so: they sit on their seat belts, write their PINs on their hands, hang their jackets on doorknobs, and chain their bicycles to park benches. Henry Ford understood this when he remarked, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse.’” This is why traditional techniques such as focus groups and surveys, which in most cases simply ask people what they want, rarely yield important insights. The tools of conventional market research can be useful in pointing toward incremental improvements, but they will never lead to those rule-breaking, game-changing, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs that leave us scratching our heads and wondering why nobody ever thought of them before. Our real goal, then, is not so much fulfilling manifest needs by creating a speedier printer or a more ergonomic keyboard; that’s the job of designers. It is helping people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have, and this is the challenge of design thinkers. How should we approach it? What tools do we have that can lead us from modest incremental changes to the leaps of insight that will redraw the map? In this chapter I’d like to focus upon three mutually reinforcing elements of any successful design program. I’ll call them insight, observation, and empathy.

Accordingly, almost every project we undertake involves an intensive period of observation. We watch what people do (and do not do) and listen to what they say (and do not say). This takes some practice.
There is nothing simple about determining whom to observe, what research techniques to employ, how to draw useful inferences from the information gathered, or when to begin the process of synthesis that begins to point us toward a solution. As any anthropologist will attest, observation relies on quality, not quantity. The decisions one makes can dramatically affect the results one gets. It makes sense for a company to familiarize itself with the buying habits of people who inhabit the center of its current market, for they are the ones who will verify that an idea is valid on a large scale—a fall outfit for Barbie, for instance, or next year’s feature on last year’s car. By concentrating solely on the bulge at the center of the bell curve, however, we are more likely to confirm what we already know than learn something new and surprising. For insights at that level we need to head for the edges, the places where we expect to find “extreme” users who live differently, think differently, and consume differently—a collector who owns 1,400 Barbies, for instance, or a professional car thief.

A tolerance for risk taking has as much to do with the culture of an organization as with its business strategy. Some would argue that a climate of open-ended exploration encourages a profligate waste of resources: Chairman Mao Zedong’s policy during the Great Leap Forward, “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” ended in complete disaster. But in contrast to the hermetically sealed environment of revolutionary China, the globalized economy today really is experiencing a “great leap forward.” In an organization that encourages experimentation, there will be projects destined to go nowhere and still others that the keepers of institutional memory prefer not to talk about (remember the Apple Newton?). But to view such initiatives as “wasteful,” “inefficient,” or “redundant” may be a symptom of a culture focused on efficiency over innovation and a company at risk of collapsing into a downward spiral of incrementalism.

The obvious counterpart to an attitude of experimentation is a climate of optimism. Sometimes the state of the world makes this difficult to sustain, but the fact remains that curiosity does not thrive in organizations that have grown cynical. Ideas are smothered before they have a chance to come to life. People willing to take risks are driven out. Up-and-coming leaders steer clear of projects with uncertain outcomes out of fear that participation might damage their chances for advancement. Project teams are nervous, suspicious, and prone to second-guessing what management “really” wants. Even when leadership wants to promote disruptive innovation and open-ended experimentation, it will find that no one is willing to step forward without permission—which usually means defeat before the start.
Without optimism—the unshakable belief that things could be better than they are—the will to experiment will be continually frustrated until it withers. Positive encouragement does not require the pretense that all ideas are created equal. It remains the responsibility of leadership to make discerning judgments, which will inspire confidence if people feel that their ideas have been given a fair hearing.

I have saved for last the single most powerful tool of design thinking. This is not CAD, rapid prototyping, or even offshore manufacturing but that empathic, intuitive, pattern-recognizing, parallel-processing, and neural-networking Internet that each of us carries between our ears. For the time being, at any rate, it is our ability to construct complex concepts that are both functionally relevant and emotionally resonant that sets humans apart from the ever more sophisticated machines we use to assist us. As long as there is no algorithm that will tell us how to bring divergent possibilities into a convergent reality or analytical detail into a synthetic whole, this talent will guarantee that accomplished design thinkers have a place in the world.

There are many approaches to prototyping, but they share a single, paradoxical feature: They slow us down to speed us up. By taking the time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long.
I wrote earlier that all design thinkers, whether or not they happen to have been trained in any of the recognized design disciplines, inhabit three “spaces of innovation.” Since design thinkers will continue to “think with their hands” throughout the life of a project—aiming toward greater fidelity as it advances toward completion—prototyping is one of the practices that enable them to occupy all three realms simultaneously.
Prototyping is always inspirational—not in the sense of a perfected artwork but just the opposite: because it inspires new ideas. Prototyping should start early in the life of a project, and we expect them to be numerous, quickly executed, and pretty ugly. Each one is intended to develop an idea “just enough” to allow the team to learn something and move on. At this relatively low level of resolution, it’s almost always best for the team members to make their own prototypes and not outsource them to others. Designers may require a fully equipped model shop, but design thinkers can “build” prototypes in the cafeteria, a boardroom, or a hotel suite.
One way to motivate early-stage prototyping is to set a goal: to have a prototype ready by the end of the first week or even the first day. Once tangible expressions begin to emerge, it becomes easy to try them out and elicit feedback internally from management and externally from potential customers. Indeed, one of the measures of an innovative organization is its average time to first prototype. In some organizations, this work can take months or even years—the automobile industry is a telling example. In the most creative organizations, it can happen within a few days.
In the ideation space we build prototypes to develop our ideas to ensure that they incorporate the functional and emotional elements necessary to meet the demands of the market. As the project moves forward, the number of prototypes will go down while the resolution of each one goes up, but the purpose remains the same: to help refine an idea and improve it. If the precision required at this stage exceeds the capabilities of the team, it may be necessary to turn to outside experts—model makers, videographers, writers, or actors, as the case may be—for help.
In the third space of innovation we are concerned with implementation: communicating an idea with sufficient clarity to gain acceptance across the organization, proving it, and showing that it will work in its intended market. Here too, the habit of prototyping plays an essential role. At different stages the prototype may serve to validate a subassembly of a subassembly: the graphics on a screen, the armrest of a chair, or a detail in the interaction between a blood donor and a Red Cross volunteer. As the project nears completion, prototypes will likely be more complete. They will probably be expensive and complex and may be indistinguishable from the real thing. By this time you know you have a good idea; you just don’t yet know how good it is.
McDonald’s is a company famous for applying the prototyping process throughout each of the spaces of innovation. In the inspirational space, designers use sketches, quick mock-ups, and scenarios to explore new services, product offerings, and customer experiences. These might be kept under wraps or shown to management or consumers to get early feedback. To nurture the ideation space, McDonald’s has built a sophisticated prototyping facility at its headquarters outside Chicago where project teams can configure every type of cooking equipment, point-of-sale technology, and restaurant layout to test new ideas. When a new idea is almost ready for implementation, it will often be tested in the form of a pilot deployed at selected restaurants.

When I speak to CEOs, the question they most often ask is “How can I make my company more innovative?” They recognize that in today’s fluid business environment innovation is key to their competitiveness, but they are equally aware of the difficulties in focusing their organizations around this goal. Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase, is one of a small number of enlightened business leaders who understand that a steady flow of innovative products rests upon an underlying culture of innovation. While he is excited by the challenge of designing new products, he is even more excited by the challenge of designing the organization itself.
Like many innovators, Hackett paid a price for coming to this question years before the business press turned “innovation” into a new kind of religion. There were no road maps to help him achieve his goals and few metrics to help gauge his success. Over time, however, through the hard work of his leadership team and his own willingness to experiment, Steelcase came to look like a different company from the one that offered the world its first fireproof wastebasket back in 1914. Whereas once technology and manufacturing capability drove most of its new-product development, the innovation process at Steelcase now begins with a focus on the needs of users and customers. Steelcase works outward from the perspective of human-centered design thinking.

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