Strategy by Design

Successful innovations must be desirable to consumers, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view. But how do you meet these requirements? Tim Brown advocates using the three stages of “design thinking”: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. For inspiration, innovators must look at the world through the eyes and the ears of users, perhaps studying analogous situations or extreme users to spark a generative process. Ideation, the core of the process, involves prototyping and realistic testing. Implementation begins with storytelling to bring the idea into the world. If a narrative can be developed around an idea, it has the best chance of being understood and implemented.