Innovation

Innovation ties everything together in business. According to British Standards, Innovation is the successful exploitation of new
ideas. It involves turning an invention into a commercial success and encouraging its widespread use. This is the stage where bold
ideas, once properly developed, are brought to the public eye. This is what Uber has achieved, now that its product is in use all over
the world and benefits people everywhere.

Examples of innovation:

successful products and services like Care of, Amazon Scout, Impossible Food, Google’s self-driving taxis, …
successful process innovations like Amazon predictive orders, or additive manufacturing processes.
Once again, Innovation cannot happen without creativity or invention, and neither creativity nor invention is useful in business if not
properly executed.

As can be clearly seen in the example of Uber, all the three steps are crucial in order to create a profitable business.

Uber achieved innovation through creative ideas, a profitable business plan, and widespread marketing, all of which allowed the
product to completely change the car sharing industry. These three stages are steps that will allow you to create and commercialize
your product, and make your business grow and succeed.
Invention

Invention is the physical creation of a new concept or idea. Also,

from Nesta’s innovation policy tookit, it is defined as The
creation of an idea to do or make something without verification
that it works, or is commercially valuable. Invention cannot occur
without creativity, but just creativity is not enough to properly
develop an idea.

Examples of invention:

product designs, business models, or working prototypes.

Uber channeled invention in creating a solid and working
business model, based upon the ideas they had formed in the
creation stage.
Creativity

Creativity is the act of channeling imagination into

something concrete. It is the very first stage of design,
where ideas start to actually take form, and a plan can be
developed.

Examples of creativity:

in the case of Uber, creativity was necessary in producing

the concept of ride sharing and of making driving jobs
accessible to any individual.
another example can be the Google Glass, which although
were very creative at the time (new, different in the market),
were not necessarily innovative (monetary return over
investment made by the company).
How does Design Thinking empower Corporate Innovation?

To beat all the odds and thrive, companies need to respond quickly to new challenges and
identify opportunities that improve the customer experience and increase revenue. Design
thinking is one of the most effective approaches that can help your organization meet these
multi-faceted challenges head-on. Explore how:

Identify Opportunities — Design thinking helps organizations identify opportunities for growth
by increasing their awareness of their customers, their needs, and the market. Designers use
tools such as empathy mapping and user journey mapping to map out customer behavior and
needs.
Solve Problems — Designers also use human-centered design thinking to create new products
and services that solve existing problems. Design thinking helps you solve problems by being
collaborative, open, and creative.
Create Solutions — Businesses need to create solutions that resolve consumer pain points. And
design thinking helps you do that by bringing together all the skills and tools needed to create
innovative solutions that meet your customers’ needs.
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that emphasizes the importance of human-
centered design. It combines user empathy, business understanding, and iterative problem-
solving to drive innovation.

Design thinking is a powerful tool that helps businesses move beyond the traditional ideas of
problem-solving and focus on creating solutions that are built with the customer in mind.

The first step in using design thinking for corporate innovation involves gathering data from
customers, conducting research, and looking at current trends in the market. Once you have
an understanding of the problem, the next step is to brainstorm and develop ideas for
solutions.

This way, design thinking enables you to shift from “a culture of compliance and fear of
failure” to a culture of fast failure and constant innovation.
How Do Industry-leaders Use Design Thinking?

Parsons-Brinkerhoff, IBM, General Electric (GE), Westpac Bank, Siemens, Procter &
Gamble (P&G), and NASA, among others, now actively leverage design thinking. They
have dedicated design thinking departments. Further, IBM hires more designers than any
other professionals and has even instituted IBM Design Thinking.

What’s more? In very successful cases, the inclusion of a design thinking model within these
companies has given birth to a new service altogether that they can offer to their clients.

When design principles are applied to innovation efforts, the success rate for your projects
improves dramatically. A research by the Design Management Institute, Cambridge, reveals
that design-led companies such as Apple, Pepsi, P&G, IBM, Nike, and Starbucks have
maintained significant stock market advantage — outperforming the S&P by an
extraordinary 228%!!
Benefits of Implementing Design Thinking in Your Innovation Activities

While design thinking has been around for some time, it has recently become more widely known — thanks to successful
examples like the iPhone and Google Maps. This reiterates that designers solve problems faster and come up with more
innovative solutions than their non-designer counterparts. But, that is not it. There are a number of other benefits too, let’s
check them out:

1. Creative Collaboration
One of the biggest benefits of design thinking is that it enables you to engage in creative collaboration. Collaboration is key
to innovation because new ideas are most often the result of different brains working together. To make the most of design
thinking, you must make room for a wide variety of perspectives in the process, including:

Design Thinkers: These are the folks who are actively involved in the design process and have a hands-on role in creating
new solutions.

Customers: The customer is the central focus of the design process and provides the insights, information, and requirements
needed to create the best solutions. The customer should be involved at every stage of the process — from ideation and
discovery to creation, testing, and refining.
2. Problem Identification
Before you can solve a problem, you first have to understand it. Design thinking helps you to dig below the surface and
discover the root causes behind the problem you are trying to solve. Your goal here is to go beyond asking, “What do
customers want?” and instead, ask “Why do customers want what they want?” and “What are their unmet needs?”

Once you have dug into the problem, you might discover that what you thought was one problem is actually two or more
problems that you can now solve with a single solution. You also need to be sure that you are addressing a real problem that
your customers want to be solved. Some organizations mistakenly solve their own problems rather than the customers’.

3. Rapid Prototyping
Another key aspect of design thinking is rapid prototyping or creating quick and cheap models, drawings, or mock-ups of a
potential solution. In addition to helping solve the problem, rapid prototyping also allows you to understand if the solution is
feasible. You should create multiple prototypes and be prepared to face frequent failures as you iterate your way to a solution
that meets your customer demands.
Prototyping does not have to mean creating physical mock-ups. Instead, you have the option of using software tools that
allow you to quickly sketch out your ideas, create clickable mock-ups, and gather feedback from customers. These tools are
great for collaborating with other team members, as well as gathering feedback from a wide range of customers.
4. Constant Feedback Loops
The process of prototyping and gathering feedback from customers helps to inform your design choices and make sure you are on
the right track. Designers often engage in “two-way” communication — where they listen just as much as they talk.

You might find that customers want something different than what you intended to design. Or, you might realize that there is an
unmet need that needs to be addressed. You might also learn that your current approach is on the right track and that you are on
your way to solving the problem. Nowadays, it is possible to get feedback from customers quickly and in a cost-effective manner
using online surveys, clickable mock-ups, and virtual reality.

5. Cultural Awareness
Design thinking is not just about creating a solution that solves a problem, it is also about understanding the cultural context that
surrounds that problem. You might find that your initial prototype or solution is well-received in a certain country but fails in
another. That is because cultural differences can affect the way customers experience the problem and how they want it to be
solved.

Design thinking helps you to consider cultural differences to create a solution that is more likely to be successfully adopted. For
example, if you are designing new packaging for your product, you might want to consider the cultural significance of the colors
used in the packaging.
Different colors have different meanings in different cultures, and you want to be sure that you are not inadvertently sending the
wrong message. If you incorporate cultural awareness into your design thinking, you will think about different colors, shapes, and
other design elements in terms of what they mean in the culture you are operating in.
5 Factors that help create a Culture of Innovation at work

In today’s world, innovation is key to success and

growth. With the ever-changing landscape of
technology and new business ideas emerging every
day, it’s more important than ever for businesses to
stay ahead of the curve by embracing a culture of
innovation. But how do you start creating such a
culture in your workplace?
Start with shaping mindsets and behaviors in your
people before embarking on big changes to
technology and business models. Humans have an
aversion to uncertainty and changes in corporations
are a trigger for natural resistance; your people are
going to prefer:

•staying with what they know

Start Small but at Scale
To create a culture of innovation at work, it is important to start small but at scale. This means that
you should start by implementing new ideas and processes in a small way, but with the intention of
creating these small changes across the organization. Doing so will help to ensure that your
employees are comfortable with the changes and that they have the opportunity to practice new
behaviors necessary for the new system. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that not all
innovations will be successful; therefore, it is important to have a plan for how you will deal with
failures. By starting small but at scale, you can create a culture of innovation at work that will
ultimately benefit your company as a whole.

Yes, you got it right, the brain needs to escape the natural fear of change by adapting to micro-
changes and starting the practice of behaviors that can make innovation sustainable – here are 5
factors to foster a culture of innovation.

Autonomy
Trust
Encouragement
Network
Transparency
Autonomy – let them choose how and when
Autonomy is key to fostering innovation at work. Employees need to feel they have the freedom to choose
how and when they work in order to be creative and innovative.

Managers should give their employees as much autonomy as possible – some companies have 10-20% of
the week allocated to projects that their employees have chosen – these projects are reviewed weekly and
are in most cases the fuel for new ideas.

Employees should be able to experiment with new ideas and methods without fear of repercussions.
Encouraging an environment where employees feel comfortable taking risks is essential for innovation.
Managers should create an atmosphere of trust and recognition, where employees feel like their ideas will be
heard and valued.

Allowing employees autonomy does not mean that managers should be hands-off. In fact, managers need to
be more involved than ever in order to help guide and support their employees’ creativity. But ultimately, it
is up to the employees themselves to decide how and when they want to work.
Trust – let them count on each other
Trust is one of the most important factors in creating a culture of innovation at work. When team
members trust each other, they are more likely to be resilient and creative.

Building trust takes time, but there are some things you can do to help create an environment of trust:

Encourage open communication: Make sure everyone feels comfortable communicating their ideas,
both good and bad.
Promote transparency: Share information openly and honestly with your team.
Support risk-taking: Encourage your team to experiment and try new things. Failure is part of the
innovation process!
Value different perspectives: Encourage employees to share their unique perspectives and ideas.
Diversity of thought is essential for innovation.
Reward collaboration: Recognize and reward employees when they work together effectively towards a
common goal.
Instead of having an environment of aggressive competition, Trust is about making a team where
members can count on each other and move towards a common challenging goal.
Encourage your people to dream big
When it comes to innovation, encourage your team to dream big. It’s important to think outside the box
and come up with ideas that may seem impossible or unreasonable at first. By encouraging your team to
aim high, you’ll create an environment where they feel comfortable taking risks and experimenting with
new ideas.

In order to get the most out of your team, it’s important to give them the freedom to explore their
creativity. Brainstorming sessions are a great way to generate new ideas and get everyone thinking
outside the box – but make it worthwhile with ideas that are focused on real-world problems. Set aside
sometime each week for your team to work on innovative projects, and make sure they have the
resources they need to succeed.

Encouraging a culture of innovation takes time and effort, but it’s worth it in the long run. A company
that encourages its employees to be creative will be more successful in the long term than one that
doesn’t. So if you want your business to succeed, start by creating a culture of innovation.
Things to Keep in Mind to make Design Thinking Work

If you want to improve your organization’s ability to use design thinking, there are a few
conditions you need to meet first:

Problem-Solving Attitude — To incorporate design thinking, your organization needs to adopt a

problem-solving mindset. Design thinking involves solving problems creatively. So, if you and
your team have a problem-solving approach, you already have a head start.
Adaptability — An adaptive mindset allows them to respond to change quickly. If your business
is stuck in a traditional mindset that promotes consistency, it will not work in favor of design
thinking.
Strong Culture — Successful organizations have a strong culture that promotes collaboration,
creativity, and open communication. If your team is not open to new ideas and practices, you
will have a harder time implementing design thinking.
Read this next: Build a Culture of Innovation in Your Organization

Design thinking is incredibly important for businesses that want to stay competitive in today’s
dynamic market. Companies must be able to innovate quickly, create new products and services,
and solve complex problems. Technological changes, shifting customer needs, and economic
trends increase and amplify business uncertainty. And we are here to help you with just that!
4 common challenges and pitfalls in design thinking:

Traditional problem-solving is straightforward. Identify a problem, come up with

potential solutions, and implement those solutions.
But what if you need to take a step back and re-identify the problem or look at it
with a different approach? How are you balancing
end-user and stakeholder desires? Will it cost your team more time and money if
you have to go back to the drawing board?
Design thinking is a versatile problem-solving framework that you can use for
virtually any challenge or project. The five stages of design thinking —
Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test — help your team overcome the
ambiguity of problem-solving. It encourages teams to collaborate with each other
to come up with the best solution for complex problems.
However, if your team hasn’t mastered or fully committed to each one of the
steps, you may encounter problems that make it harder to reap the benefits of
design thinking.
Here are 4 common challenges that teams face when implementing design
thinking practices.
1. Lack of in-depth user research

Design thinking is human-centered. The empathy stage in design thinking is meant to give you an in-depth understanding of
your end user or customer. It’s an essential step for coming up with solutions that will work specifically for your customer so
you can optimize the user experience.

Some teams skim over — or skip entirely — the empathy stage. But you can’t get into the minds of your user and help them
solve a problem if you don’t know them. Conducting research can help you minimize investment risk to your company, find
emerging trends in your industry, and identify pain points for your audience.

Teams that gloss over this step may have a hard time making connections between their users’ pain points and how they can
solve them.

To get the most impact from the data and information you collect, create a plan for understanding and mapping how users feel.
Empathy mapping helps you identify and visualize your target audience. Your goal is to find out what your users say, do, think,
and feel.

Make sure you have a plan that does the following:

Identifies what info you’ll gather, e.g., questions to ask, demographics, preferences
Establishes how you’ll get info, e.g., surveys, focus groups, general research
Describes where you’ll gather info, e.g., in person, review forums, Reddit, social media
2. A company culture that doesn’t foster collaboration

Design thinking requires intentional collaboration. Some remote teams struggle with this because hybrid and remote
collaboration is inherently more difficult. Studies show that employees can feel disconnected from their company and
coworkers. More than half of employees in one such study said they feel remote work “hinders tasks that require
internal/external collaboration.”

Learn more: Why hybrid collaboration is harder than you think

If your company culture doesn’t foster collaboration or invest in cultivating its employees’ collaboration skills, then
collaborating throughout the design-thinking process may be challenging. Companies that struggle with siloed departments
don’t have standards or precedents that facilitate working together. Or maybe your company is remote but doesn’t have
enough tools (or the right tools) to make collaboration work.

As a manager, you can help leadership and other company stakeholders see the value in design thinking. If you’ve used
design thinking to solve a problem in the past, show them your process so they can see that it works. Help them understand
that it can yield better solutions, so they buy in and equip your teams with the tools and resources you need.

Show leadership the benefits of design thinking. If the process has worked for you before, share a case study with your
leadership team. A case study or similar type of example can demonstrate how design thinking works differently and more
effectively than traditional problem-solving.
3. Inability to adjust to a non-linear process

Design thinking lends itself to flexibility by enabling teams to go back and forth between stages to solve problems. With
traditional problem-solving, on the one hand, teams think that once they finish a step, they move on to the next. And they
don’t or can’t go back to previous steps. Design-thinking methodology, on the other hand, encourages a non-linear approach
and often involves going through stages “out of order.”
For example, if a team gets to the prototype stage and realizes they have a better idea, they can go back to the ideation stage
without wasting resources or time because they’ve built this agility into the plan and budget. The design-thinking process
enables teams to explore multiple options to solve a problem rather than sticking to a poor solution and trying to make it
work.
If your team is struggling to take advantage of the nonlinearity of design thinking, set a timeframe and plan for each stage.
Make your plan as flexible as possible, knowing that one stage may take longer than another and that you may have to go
back to a stage. Assign responsibilities early on and get insights from team members about how long their tasks could
potentially take based on their skills and experience.
When you’re making a plan, consider these components for each stage:
Resources available to you, e.g., number of team members, budget, tools, knowledge
Skill sets and experience of team members involved
Number of tasks to complete
Difficulty level of tasks to complete
4. Not letting go of a bad idea

It’s easy for team members to get attached to a product or idea they poured their hearts
into. But sometimes, a product or an idea gets to the testing phase only for you to realize it
won’t work and you need another solution. Your team has worked hard to get it here, and
it’s understandable that they want to keep working on it. Instead of digging your heels in,
focus on creating the right solution for your users.

Be transparent and up front with your team. Set expectations with all team members about
the iterative nature of the process. It’s important to help team members avoid getting too
invested in one singular idea. As they work through the different stages of design thinking,
encourage them to explore multiple possibilities and avenues rather than just one.
Learn more: The double-diamond framework can help teams embrace the non-linear nature of co-
design.

Perfectionism and attachment are roadblocks to the design-thinking process and are also
counteractive to adaptability and agility. If a solution won’t work, it’s better to go back to the
drawing board so you can come up with one that does work for your users.

It’s important to be able to move on quickly and adapt rather than try to make something that won’t
work, work. A big part of the ideation phase in design thinking is challenging assumptions and
thinking outside of the box.

Try the double diamond technique for your next innovation project
The double diamond is a visual representation of the design process, outlining each step and action
across the four steps: discover, define, develop, & deliver. Using the diamond visual, this technique
shows where teams should diverge and converge throughout the design thinking process.
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What is Problem Decomposition?

If a computer system is a multiprocessing system, then a single problem/program

must be divided into subproblems in order to assign them to the processors. In
order to perform this task a technique, Problem decomposition is used. It is the
process of decomposing a problem/program into multiple
subproblems/subprograms. It is the basic building block of Parallel Computing.

Decomposition is needed because a problem needs to be divided into different

tasks and then mapped to the processors, whereas a task is a subproblem
resulting from the decomposition of a problem.
In order to decompose a problem/program, the following techniques can be
used by a computer:

Recursive Decomposition: This technique of decomposition is a general-

purpose technology that can be used to decompose any sort of problem in
computation. It works basically on the basis of the “Divide and Conquer”
principle, which basically divides a problem into subproblems (Divide) and
then assign them to different processors (Conquer). A simple example is the
sorting of an array using the Quick Sort Algorithm, which basically divides the
array into simplest units and then processes them in order to sort them in
ascending or descending order.
Data Decomposition: This technique of decomposition is again general purpose. It divides the data in
the program into parts and then assigns them to instructions(tasks). Data Decomposition can be
considered in a matrix multiplication problem. Let say we have two matrices A and B, and their
product is stored in another matrix C.
Matrix A: Matrix B: Matrix C:

A1 A2 B1 B2 C1 C2
A3 A3 B3 B4 C3 C4

So, by data decomposition following tasks will be generated to get the product of A and
B, and storing the new matrix in C.
Task 1: C1= A1*B1
Task 2: C2= A2*B3
Task 3: C3= A3*B2
Task 4: C4= A4*B4

Now, these tasks will be assigned to four processors.

•Explorative Decomposition:

• This technique of decomposition is a special-purpose

technique, it will be used for a certain types of
problems. A problem will be decomposed using
explorative decomposition, if by decomposing it a
search space is acquired, from where every element
(subproblem) is processed by the processors. An
example of this type of decomposition is used in
Puzzle games, where we have a search space and we
have to check the position of every part of the puzzle,
to solve it.
Speculative Decomposition: This technique is again a special-purpose
technique. In this technique, the problem is divided and assigned to the
processors without any investigation or research, whether the decision made is
correct or wrong (speculative). Its best example is a program comprising of
nested if. In a program, if an if statement contains another if, and the program is
already decomposed and the lines of code are assigned to multiple processors
without even checking the conditions, the processors will run both the if
statement and its inner if, but after some time when the condition is checked,
e.g. false and the decision is made, then the other if statement will also be
discarded. Its limitation is that it doesn’t work on the basis of correct decision
making, it just divides and maps to the processors, but it is faster than other
decomposition techniques.