Monthly Archives: March 2010

Design Thinking 2.0: Enabling Innovation with Web 2.0 – Part 3


In the first part of this series I examined the case for, and some of the key aspects of Design Thinking.   In Part 2 of this series, I distinguished between “Core” and “Edge” Capabilities and made the point that Design Thinking typically is heavy on Edge capabilities, whereas most businesses, and certainly, most corporate IT organizations are highly biased towards Core capabilities.  Now let’s drill into the Web 2.0 implications of Design Thinking.

The easiest way to do this for IT people is to think in terms of a process, the steps in that process, and how information technology might enable those steps.

Tim Brown‘s “Three Spaces of Innovation”

A good place to explore the Design Thinking process is in IDEO CEO, Tim Brown’s excellent HBR article from June 2008.  In that paper, Tim presents a model of how Design Thinking happens.  Tim’s model describes “Three Spaces of Innovation” – Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation.  What I like about this picture is that it’s not a simple linear process – it is somewhat chaotic, full of little feedback loops and more concerned with how things connect and flow that with a rigid process.

How Web 2.0 Might Enable Innovation Activities

In the figure below I have added simplistic examples of how different types of Web 2.0 capabilities might play into the major activities contained in Tim Brown’s model.  Consider this a simple illustration – there are a zillion possible variations on this theme!

Move Edge Activities to the Cloud

I believe that Cloud Computing in its various forms presents a relatively attractive way to quickly develop Edge capabilities.  Given that Design Thinking requires that we become more comfortable with experimentation, at the very least we should be experimenting with the Cloud, and Edge capabilities present an ideal case for cloud experiments.  We can keep them relatively isolated, implement them very quickly with little to no capital outlay, and everything we do in the cloud is inherently collaborative (e.g., think Google Docs, Google Wave, Mindmeister, etc.) just as just about everything we need to be doing around Design Thinking is inherently collaborative.

A More Traditional Process View

For those that prefer to take a more traditional process view, Wikipedia suggests a simple 7-Step Design Thinking process, rendered as a loop below.  Note, please don’t take this process too literally.  Design Thinking is more about ‘iterate and converge’ than the more typical IT process.  These steps are rarely going to be linear and sequential.

Collaborative Intents for Each Step

A couple of years ago, working on a multi-company research project with my colleague Tammy Erickson at nGenera, we identified 10 distinct types of ‘Collaborative Intents’ to be considered when planning any type of collaboration initiative.  For each collaborative intent, we can be quite explicit about the business outcomes to be achieved.  So, for example, in the Design Thinking step “Define” we are interested in ‘connecting ideas’ that might not typically be connected in order to amplify knowledge and identify innovation opportunities.

Web 2.0 Technologies for Each Step


We can map the types of Collaborative Intent to each step in the Design Thinking process.  In the table above, as an illustration, for each type of Collaborative Intent, I have identified the types of technology that might be useful to enable that intent, and provided some examples of actual technologies in each space.  Please note, mention or lack thereof for any specific technology does not imply any endorsement (or lack thereof!)

Does this make sense to you?  Do you have experience in applying Web 2.0 to Design Thinking?  Please weigh in – let’s generate some dialog on these ideas and their reality in practice.

Image courtesy of Red Jotter

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Design Thinking 2.0: Enabling Innovation with Web 2.0 – Part 2


In my first post in this series, “Design Thinking 2.0: How Web 2.0 Might Foster and Enable an Innovation Revolution” I summarized the concepts of Design Thinking and raised the question of how Web 2.0 might enable increased innovation.  (For an interesting perspective on Design Thinking by Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum, see his excellent essay based on his 2007 speech to the Royal College of Art in London.)

In my next post I will  drill down and suggest ways to use Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to increase innovativeness and business success, but for now I want to examine the Core/Edge distinction in order to focus us clearly on Edge capabilities, where innovation tends to surface – without being encumbered by the Core.

“Core” and “Edge” Capabilities

Identifying the best ways to leverage collaborative technologies for innovation require an appreciation of the distinction between “Core” and “Edge” business capabilities.  The notions of “Core” and “Edge” I think were first articulated in June 2005 by John Hagel III, a former McKinsey consultant, and John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox in a Wharton Summary interview titled “Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?“  In that interview, Hagel noted:

The… edge… has to do with the notion of competitive advantage, but it also has to do with the view that the ability to develop capabilities involves operating at the edge. Of course, “edge” has multiple meanings as well. It means the edge of the enterprise, the edge of business processes, geographic edges in terms of emerging economies, demographic edges in terms of younger generations coming in with different mindsets – it’s a whole set of edges that create the opportunity for accelerating capability building.”

Seely Brown noted in the same interview:

… being able to listen deeply and participate on the edge, you can pick up things before anybody else picks them up, and you can use that to accelerate your own capability building… This puts a new spin on why distributed collaboration around the world might be critical in creating this sustainable edge.”

My colleagues and I picked up this theme in our multi-company research at nGenera and I covered it in some depth starting in March 2008 with my “Surfing and IT Innovation” post, followed in July 2008 with my “Edginess and IT Innovation” post.

The reason this Core/Edge distinction is so important for IT professionals in the corporate environment is that the Core exerts enormous gravitational pull – innovation activities such as business experiments at the edge tend to get pulled into the core where standards and rigid processes rule.  The Core typically consumes 70% to 90% of IT resources, starving edge activities of the resources and focus they need to flourish.

Requirements of Core Capabilities

Core Capabilities exist to support exploitation of existing business opportunities.  As such they tend to be ‘locked down’, complex and hard to change – in fact, they are designed to prevent ‘bad change.’  Core processes are intended to be highly stable and predictable, typically built on proprietary and relatively fixed architectures.

Requirements of Edge Capabilities

By contrast, Edge Capabilities exist to stimulate and support the exploration of new business opportunities. As such they must be open, agile, transparent and adaptive.  While Core capabilities must ‘prevent bad change’, Edge capabilities are designed to stimulate ‘good change.’  They leverage open, emergent architecture and open sourcing. This, of course, is the realm of Web 2.0 – social media, open source, open innovation, cloud computing, etc.

Balancing Core and Edge Capabilities

The table below further highlights the differences between Core and Edge capabilities and shows example of each type.  My point here is that most IT organizations have many years of experience in perfecting Core capabilities but have relatively little experience with Edge capabilities.  The IT leaders’ natural preference is to control rather than facilitate, to direct rather than stimulate.


In Part 3 of this series, we will look at a generic Design Thinking process and see how each step can be enabled by Web 2.0 “Edge” capabilities.

Image courtesy of Larval Subjects

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Design Thinking 2.0: How Web 2.0 Might Foster and Enable an Innovation Revolution


About 3 years ago I first become aware of what can best be called a ‘movement’ dedicated to “Design Thinking,” when the term started showing up in some of my favorite blogs (e.g., Idris Mootee’s Innovation Playground).  The concepts became clearer and more compelling to me in June, 2008 when the Harvard Business Review published a wonderful piece on Design Thinking by Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, the world-renowned innovation and design firm).  Since then, several books as well as some remarkable shifts in company fortunes have reinforced my interest, including Tim Brown’s ‘Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspired Innovation‘ and ‘The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage‘ by Roger L. Martin.

Most recently I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how Web 2.0 might help foster and enable Design Thinking.  I’ve been doing this as part of a new multi-company research project I am leading.  And I’m very excited!

The Case for Design Thinking in the U.S.

The insightful Thomas L. Friedman, in a New York Times Op-Ed column on March 2, 2010 titled, “A Word From the Wise” noted comments in a speech by Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, who was in Washington to talk about competitiveness:

that a 2009 study done by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and cited recently in Democracy Journal “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness — not great, but not bad. Yet that same study also measured what they call ‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future. The study relied on 16 different metrics of human capital — I.T. infrastructure, economic performance and so on. On this scale, the U.S. ranked dead last out of the same 40 nations.”

Too many companies (and the governments that shape corporate behavior through taxes and regulations) have become too comfortable with exploitation, and not sufficiently adept at exploration.  They have come to rely too much on analytical thinking, and not enough on intuition.  They have become so bogged down in their business core, they have all but ignored the edge where customer problems meet the creative process to create new products and services.

In the next few posts, I want to share what I have discovered and learned so far, and hopefully stimulate some constructive discussion and engage you, my readers, in shaping the upcoming research.

Does Your Executive Management Know What They Are Doing?

In a 1998 HBR article entitled, “Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn from Design,” Richard K. Lester, Michael J. Piore, Kamal M. Malek, observed:

Today’s markets are increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Managers can never know precisely what they’re trying to achieve or how best to achieve it. They can’t even define the problem, much less engineer a solution. For guidance, they can look to the managers of product design, a function that has always been fraught with uncertainty.”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”  Marshall McLuhan

So, the big question for me is how can the tools we have shaped into Web 2.0 enable ‘Design Thinking’ to help us realize dramatically higher business performance?  It seems that we have a whole new and powerful set of capabilities – social networking, crowdsourcing, innovation jams, social and semantic search, collaborative project, program and portfolio management, polling, listening feeds and activity streams, tags, 2D and 3D modeling, prototyping, virtual worlds, workflow modeling and automation, and on and on. And yet, aside from knowing that a distant friend is having a bad hair day, most of these tools and technologies are still looking for a meaningful business purpose.

So, What Is “Design Thinking”?

There are many definitions and descriptions, but the ones I’ve found most illuminating are:

The methodology commonly referred to as design thinking is a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results.” – Mark Dziersk, Fast Compan

A discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” – Tim Brown, Ideo

Design thinking is always linked to an improved future.  It is a creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas, rather than critical thinking which is more concerned with analysis and the ‘breaking down’ of ideas.   Design Thinking moves design from a downstream (tactical) step to upstream (strategic) – vests everyone involved with the role of ‘designer.”  At its best, Design Thinking balances art and science, intuition and analytics, validity (doing the right things) and reliability (doing things right), exploration and exploitation

Design Thinking Has Profound Organizational Implications

Design Thinking has profound implications for:

  • Organization structures
  • Rewards, recognition, compensation
  • Portfolio management and strategic alignment
  • Governance and leadership style
  • Talent management and global sourcing

I believe that it also presents a significant opportunity …

  • For IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, Legal, etc. to step forward and make a real contribution to business success
  • To re-think ‘staff /line’ roles and responsibilities
  • To learn to love matrix management!

How is Design Thinking playing out in your organization?  How have Web 2.0 capabilities helped (or hurt) these efforts?  How do you see this playing out over the next couple of years?

To be clear, Design Thinking is essentially human centered, and there is something potentially incongruous in discussing the use of Web 2.0 to enable it.  However, I still firmly believe that these collective and collaborative technologies have a role in “greasing the skids” to make Design Thinking more accessible.  I will pick this up and drill down a bit further into this realm and discuss  ideas on how Web 2.0 can play a positive role in Design Thinking.

Graphic courtesy of IDEO

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