22HU220: IDT
Unit-5: DESIGN THINKING FOR STRATEGIC INNOVATIONS: Growth – Story telling
representation – Strategic Foresight - Change – Sense Making - Maintenance Relevance – Value redefinition
- Extreme Competition – experience design - Standardization – Humanization - Creative Culture – Rapid
prototyping, Strategy and Organization – Business Model design.
Design Thinking for Strategic Innovations is an approach that combines creative problem-solving
with stage-wise planning to drive innovation within organizations.
Strategic Innovations:
Refer to novel approaches that align with an organization’s long-term goals and competitive
advantage.
These innovations can involve new products, services, business models, or processes.
Strategic foresight plays a crucial role in identifying emerging trends and anticipating future needs.
Combining design thinking with strategic planning allows organizations to create innovative
solutions that address real-world challenges while aligning with their overall strategy.
In practical terms, this approach encourages cross-functional collaboration, rapid prototyping, and a
focus on user needs. It helps organizations stay agile, adapt to change, and create value in a
competitive landscape.
Strategic Management: is the process of setting goals, procedures, and objectives in order to make a
company or organization more competitive. Typically, strategic management looks at effectively deploying
staff and resources to achieve these goals.
Innovation Management: It is the concept which has multiple aspects and dimensions and are contributed
based on the multiple disciplines of the study that has a various theories and frameworks.
Types of Innovations: There are four types of innovations which are (1) Disruptive vs Sustaining
innovation (2) Radical vs incremental innovation (3) Innovation matrix (4) Architectural vs Modular
innovation.
Strategic Innovation: is an organization's process of reinventing or redesigning its corporate strategy to
drive business growth, generate value for the company and its customers, and create competitive advantage.
This type of innovation is essential for organizations to adapt to the speed of technology change.
Features of Strategic Innovation: it demands for holistic approach towards the activities of the
organizations at various levels in the organization. The features of strategic innovation are as under:
1. This concept is based on the long-term perspectives and is developed based on the developing strategic
which matches the innovations in the organization.
2. The main objective of strategic innovation is to create competitive space for the products and services
offered by the organization.
3. The process of strategic innovation combines business process with creative solutions to the problems in
the organizations.
4. Collect information about the business from unconventional sources and provide innovative strategy for
the challenges in the organization.
5. Development of the organization process which can accommodate the changes in the organization and
build robots business process and procedures in the organization.
Scope of Strategic Innovation
The scope of strategic innovation is based on the seven dimensions which include (1) Managed innovation
process (2) Strategic alignment (3) Industry foresight (4) Customer Insight (5) Technology (6) Organization
Readiness (7) Implementation
1. Managed Innovation: In this process the facilitating process includes external and internal perceptive with
regards to organization capabilities, process, procedures and customers.
2. Strategic Alignment: This is created for development of shared vision, goals and actions among the key
stakeholders in the organization.
3. Industry Foresight: This process includes deeper understanding of the driving forces, influence of the new
technology, competition dynamics and changing market trends.
4. Customer Insight: Strategic innovation provides deeper understanding of the customers’ needs and
demands and provide innovative strategic for the growth of the market.
5. Technology: The perspective of technology is assessed through strategic innovation on the aspect of
internal technology capabilities, organization capabilities and reaching higher customer satisfaction.
6. Readiness of the organization: Strategic innovation provides an insight on the readiness of the company to
the changing innovations and also provides insights on the capability of the organization to accept the
changes in the business environment.
7. Implementation: Strategic innovation provides an insight on the process of implementation of the strategy
through the aspect of process and procedures and policies which align the organization to the innovation in
the organization.
Design Thinking and Strategic Innovation
Design Thinking is a human-cantered approach to innovation that integrates customer emotion and empathy,
the possibilities of digital tech and analytics, and the requirements for business success. Integration of the
strategy supports in the reaching the market better and improving the competitiveness of the firms in the
market.
In order to link design thinking and strategic innovation. Design thinking is based on the mental activity in
understanding the things and process of the organization. While strategic innovation is based on the concept
of strategic management. Interaction between the design thinking and strategic innovation provides
following benefits, they are as under;
1. Concept of design thinking has supported in developing products and services which match the
expectation of the customers and there by supporting the strategy of the organization.
2. Design thinking provides an opportunity to integration of new ideas and thinking which is essential for the
development of right strategy for the organization.
Practices of Integrating Design Thinking in Strategic Innovation
Design thinking and strategic innovation has four practices they are (1) Reviewing (2) Simulating (3)
Conversing (4) Collaborating.
Reviewing: Design thinking is based on the data collected through various sources, which include
customers, employees and other stake holders. Based on the data collected protype is developed through the
concept of design thinking. These development support in development of right strategy for the innovation
in the organization.
Simulating: The concept of simulation provides insights on the experience of the individual in the real world
of business. Simulating opens up strategy practice because it provokes managers to form an empathetic
engagement with the customer experience, thereby making the market context immediately appraisable.
Conversing: Conversing was particularly important in enabling collective reflection and getting agreement
between participants with diverse understandings of the strategy. In order words, this aspect of design-led
strategizing amplified managers’ attention to the real fit within product-market fit.
Collaborating: This practice was especially useful when teams were dealing with complex issues that could
easily be forgotten or lost in conversational dialogue. Rather than trying to empathetically understand each
manager’s perspective (as in the conversing practice) the focus in collaborative translation was on
generating a shared solution to a complex problem.
