The hidden values related to the variety of design thinking models

Design Thinking (DT) is spreading in business community as a relevant innovation practice to change product and services. The term is more and more used and discussed, so this article – leveraging a literature review of 15 years – aims to find and to show the explicit value generated by the different DT patterns as recognized by literature and – going through a more deepening and complementary literature analysis – it expresses some hidden values associated to the four main patterns of DT. A growing stream of literature in last years - on one hand - deepened the underpinning constructs and the founding principles of DT intended in a first frame as a “Creative Problem Solving” approach – on the other hand - it stretched the application of DT to novel scopes and fields embracing novel principles and practices. Creative problem solving – for instance – is mostly recognized for the value of “ideating”, recognizing the variety and the number of different ideas to solve a user problem. On the other hand, the principles embedded in it – as abductive reasoning, “reframing”, quick prototyping – seem to recall the same principles of “lean entrepreneurship”. Moreover, the emerging need related to digital environments to quickly test and grasping feedbacks from the user induced a new way to apply DT mostly pushing on the execution phase. “Sprint” is a process-oriented to produce insights from mapping and analyzing user behaviours, to take a fast decision about new interactive concepts and rapidly build “Minimum Viable Products” to accumulate learning and iteratively change the outcomes. Even this aspect seems to be connected and strengthen the lean entrepreneurial literature stream. DT, furthermore – leveraging people creativity – needs to continuously engage employees and stakeholders in compelling and motivating ways. Given that everyone assumes a personalized role in contributing to the creative process, an emerging challenge of DT consists to increase the “creative confidence” of individual and teams. At this level, DT seems to be more internally oriented – nurturing the knowledge and human capital of organizations – instead of placing novel solutions on the marketplace.