Ready for an adventure? That's where design thinking will take you. You'll learn a lot, cope with a lot of uncertainties, and discover many new things. Design thinking offers you a method to develop innovative products, services, business models, and concepts. With design thinking, you can use the obstacles in your path to create something new, learn to think outside the box, and still move straight to your goal. Design thinking lets you answer questions that your customers never thought they would have, and later your customers will say: “This is exactly the solution I was always waiting for.”

Developing innovative ideas always takes some effort. Compared to traditional product development processes, this effort is manageable. Asking yourself whether you can afford design thinking is the wrong way to start. Ask yourself instead whether you can afford to skip design thinking. Yes, design thinking costs money, but not investing in design thinking costs you more in the long run.

About This Book

The book you’re holding in your hands is a guide for practitioners with a 360-degree view of the innovative approach known as design thinking. It

• Takes a look at the entire process, from beginning to end: You start with the customer’s problem and end with a solution for the customer.
• Examines all significant success factors for design thinking — the five Ps:
  • Practices
  • People
  • Principles
  • Processes
  • Places
• Follows different perspectives on design thinking: You learn which steps you must take in order to succeed with design thinking, from these perspectives:
  • The company
  • The project
  • The employee
  • The customer

This book answers your questions about what design thinking is, which conditions must be created at your company in order for it to succeed, how you can plan a project, and how to implement it successfully. This book can be used in myriad ways and is a Swiss army knife in paper form. It is

• A step-by-step manual for using design thinking to identify a problem and come up with a solution
• A guidebook with practical suggestions for the implementation of a design thinking strategy
• A reference book divided into parts, chapters, and sections so that you can quickly find the content you’re looking for when you need it

This book, which is designed so that you can swiftly get a grasp on everything, features many examples, instructions, checklists, illustrations, and tables. It’s also structured systematically according to the design thinking process.

Conventions Used in This Book

This book doesn’t have many rules. The entire book is structured so that you can quickly find everything you need and get a grasp on the contents. The detailed table of contents helps you jump right to the information you need, and each chapter begins with a brief and succinct description of the chapter's main topics. Whenever topics overlap or other chapters are mentioned, cross-references help you conveniently jump back and forth between the chapters. If you’re interested in a particular term, you can look it up in the index.

Foolish Assumptions

This book is not (only) for designers. Design thinking is too important for you to let only designers develop attractive products. Whether you work at a company, an educational institution, a research institute, a public agency, or a nonprofit organization, you can benefit from the people-based approach that is at the heart of design thinking. Whether you have an education in the technical, economic, or social field, this creative approach gives you new stimuli and ideas.

On an individual level, I make the following assumptions about you:

• You’re working in a department at a company and want to see the bigger picture.
• You want to apply design thinking at your organization and need to know how to implement it.
• Your company is already working with some design thinking methods. You want to enhance your previous work with new methods, tips, and tricks for its implementation, and you want a set of comprehensive instructions.

You don’t need to have any specific skills for this book — you only have to be curious.

What You Don’t Have to Read

It’s worth your time to read the entire book. You can find important tips everywhere in it. Even if you can use only a few of its suggestions, the time and money you invest will be worth it. I guarantee that you’ll be able to use more than just a few of the tips, regardless of whether you’re a novice or an expert. Some of the text in this book appears in a gray box, in order to highlight background information. You don’t absolutely need this info, but it’s always helpful.

How This Book Is Organized

To make things easier for you, I've arranged this book into four distinct parts, as described in this section.

Icons Used in This Book

Now and then you'll find symbols in in the margins of this book. Their purpose is to make you aware of important information.

This icon points to tips and tricks that should be helpful when you apply and implement an idea. They show you how you can improve your project.

This icon highlights illustrative examples from practical experience. They should offer inspiration for your project.

This icon makes you aware of potential stumbling blocks and shows you how to not do something. If you avoid errors that others have made before you, you’ll save time, money, and effort.

Where to Go from Here

You can start immediately, by choosing one of these two strategies:

• Read the book straight through, from cover to cover.
• Find individual chapters that you want to read first. (Each chapter covers an entire subject area so that you can read and understand it independently of the other chapters.) If you have no experience with design thinking yet, I recommend starting with Chapter 1, which offers a crash course in design thinking principles.

My advice to you: Read the way design thinkers would do it. Experiment with the reading strategy that works best for you. Jump to different sections while you read the book, if that makes sense to you. If necessary, reread a chapter multiple times or look up individual terms in the index. The idea here is for you to come up with your own way to read this book effectively.

IN THIS PART …

Get to know design thinking with its advantages and principles.

Examine the individual steps in the design thinking process.

Create the foundation for success and prepare your organization for the project.

Define the goals, plan workflows, and resources for the project work.

Assemble a powerful team, arrange team-appropriate rooms, and manage team responsibilities as well as team communication.