How can your organization become more innovative in today’s increasingly competitive global travel marketplace? Design thinking may hold the answer.
 
As its name implies, Design Thinking is the methodology used by designers to create new and original products and services. By applying the same creative thinking methods designers use, you can help your organization supercharge its innovation process and help to ensure its continued success in the future.
 
This article takes a brief look at Design Thinking. It also suggests some strategies for employing design thinking within your company or organization.

Design Thinking Defined

Design Thinking is an effective and proven methodology used by designers to generate and test ideas for new products and services. Today, more and more companies and organizations are turning to Design Thinking to enhance their capacity for innovation.
 
How does Design Thinking differ from more traditional business thinking? Traditional business thinking is based on a combination of inductive or deductive reasoning, on observation and analysis. Design Thinking, in contrast, is considered to be “abductive”. It is oriented to synthesizing or combining information to produce original and potentially profitable business concepts.
 
Design Thinking and traditional business thinking also differ in their focus. Most business thinking is focused on ongoing processes such as management, finance, marketing, sales, or human resources. Design Thinking, in contrast, is project-oriented and relatively short-term in its approach. It focuses on solving a distinct problem or challenge. When a solution is developed, the process ends, and the focus is directed to other projects.
 
Design Thinking is an adaptable process that can be used by almost any type of organization, large or small. It can be employed to generate original new ideas and approaches not only for products, but for services, customer experiences or business and marketing strategies. Proponents of Design Thinking believe that organizations can benefit by adopting its techniques across all functional areas, rather limiting it to design-related functions alone, in order to generate more creative and more fully integrated solutions to business and marketing challenges and opportunities.

Ten Essential Characteristics of Design Thinking

Creative: It generates high-quality ideas, then tests and refines them to produce new and original solutions.
 
Strategic: It considers economic conditions and trends, business assets and liabilities, allies and competitors, and other strategic factors as part of its methodology.
 
Forward-looking: By generating unique and original solutions, Design Thinking not only anticipates but helps to create the future.
 
Integrative: It integrates information, ideas and research from a broad cross-section of functional areas to generate superior solutions.
 
Customer-centered: It begins with observations of customer behavior and utilizes key insights derived from those observations.
 
Research-based: It utilizes existing research and initiates original research as required to gain an in-depth understanding of the challenge it must solve.
 
Adaptable: Its methodology can be adapted to enhance innovation across a variety of companies and organizations, large and small.
 
Experimental: Through a process of developing and refining prototypes Design Thinking goes beyond other creative thinking processes to help generate more effective solutions.
 
Leading Edge: It incorporates the latest trends in technology, business and markets into its methodology to help advance the leading edge of product and service innovation.
 
Sustainable: It embraces sustainability and seeks to develop comprehensive solutions that benefit customers, businesses and the environment.

The Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking proceeds from an initial definition of a problem or challenge and progresses to idea-generation, the testing of potential solutions, deploying a solution and, finally, following up on the results. The process can be divided into five primary phases:

Define & Research

Define the nature of the business challenge or opportunity you are seeking to address. Determine target audiences and observe customers to assess their needs and wants. Review significant research and existing solutions. Evaluate business competitors and consider positive impacts of business allies and partner organizations. Look at relevant business trends and market conditions. Evaluate new digital technologies that can be integrated into potential solutions. Consider green issues and sustainability from the beginning.

Ideate & Evaluate

Based on the work accomplished in phase one, generate new and original ideas for solving the challenge. Encourage individuals representing a cross-section of different functional areas within your organization to participate in the process to gain additional and potentially valuable insights and perspectives. Engage in creative thinking techniques such as brainstorming. Keep communication among participants open and leverage new technologies, including Web 2.0 tools, to foster an active and ongoing exchange of information and ideas.

Prototype & Test

Test your most promising ideas through a rapid prototyping process that helps you to better evaluate potential solutions. Where appropriate, involve customers and other relevant end-users in this process. Look for Web 2.0 opportunities to test your ideas, for example, by deploying a virtual prototype on your organization’s website, or elsewhere on the Web. Test-drive service concepts on a limited basis in a single hotel, resort or other venue to gain valuable insights and ideas. Repeat the prototyping process, going through as much iteration as required to evaluate and refine potential solutions.

Select & Develop

Review the results from your prototyping experiences. Compare the results obtained with the original definition of the challenge or problem to be solved as defined in phase. Determine that all requirements of the project have been met to the greatest degree possible. Select the most effective solution. Make any additional changes or refinements as required. Develop the finished product or service and deliver it to the final recipients.

Launch & Learn

Launch the new product or service. Coordinate relevant marketing, public relations and advertising initiatives. Back it up with technical assistance and customer service support. Observe and record its performance. Gather information from customers across a variety of conventional and digital communication platforms. Make post-launch changes or enhancements to fine tune your offering. Use the information and insights you gather to guide future efforts.

Design Thinking at Proctor & Gamble

Cincinnati-based Proctor & Gamble Corporation is well-known for its business and marketing innovations including the concept of Brand Management. A major producer of consumer products, P&G has assets of over $81-billion and employs 130,000 persons worldwide.
 
P&G is continuing its legacy of business innovation through a recently-launched Design Thinking Initiative that seeks to make design a key factor in nearly every aspect of the company’s activities. In order to “jump start” Design Thinking all through the company, P&G is using a team of over one hundred facilitators to conduct Design Thinking workshops at its locations all across the globe.
 
Proctor & Gamble’s Design Thinking Initiative was developed by Vice-President for Design, Claudia Kotchka. Team members involved in the initiative represent a broad spectrum of expertise ranging from information technology and marketing, to research & development and design. In a recent interview, Proctor & Gamble’s CEO, President and Chairman “A.G.” Lafley suggested that Design Thinking can be a positive factor in business innovation through “imagining what could be possible”.
 
The notion of embedding Design Thinking throughout a 130,000-person global company may seem daunting. Yet, Proctor & Gamble clearly believes this effort will pay off through increased corporate creativity and business innovation in the years ahead.

Leveraging Design at W Hotels

Starwood’s successful W Hotels brand is the fastest-growing luxury hotel brand in the world. It is a design-focused brand that successfully leverages design to differentiate the W Hotels brand from its competitors.
 
The company’s hotels display distinctive and unique design approaches in their architecture, interior spaces and furnishings. Excellent design makes W Hotels’ promotional and informational materials, advertisements and website stand out from those of other hotel brands. The company’s design-focus extends even into uniforms worn by its employees that feature styling by designers such as Michael Kors and Gwen Stefani.
 
A customer-focus and prototyping are two key elements of Design Thinking and W Hotels used both when it launched its sub-brand Aloft Hotels within the popular virtual world Second Life. Online visitors were able to experience and comment on the design, providing the company with valuable insights that could be used in the design of its real-world hotels.
 
By focusing on its customers, thinking creatively and leveraging design to obtain a competitive advantage, W Hotels employs many of the concepts used in Design Thinking to help make it the world’s fastest growing hotel brand in its segment.

Design Thinking & Your Organization

Design Thinking can be leveraged to help you create new products, services, customer experiences, business and marketing strategies, and more. Following are some ideas for leveraging Design Thinking within your company or organization:
 
Develop an original Design Thinking initiative that is tailored to the unique structure, operations, goals and objectives of your organization.
 
■  Identify the essential business, marketing and sales functions where Design Thinking can be most effectively utilized.
 
■  Distribute articles and information about Design Thinking to your staff members to increase knowledge and awareness of this technique.
 
■  Identify the key individuals who are most likely to be successful in introducing Design Thinking initiatives into your organization at the company, division or departmental level.
 
■  Consider how you can use Design Thinking to stimulate more creative and profitable communications between designers and non-designers in your organization.
 
■  Sponsor a Design Thinking seminar or program to enhance awareness of this creative process and to elicit feedback regarding its potential use within your organization.

Conclusion

Driven by digital technologies, emerging markets and a challenging worldwide economic situation, hospitality, travel and tourism marketing is more fast-paced, internationally-focused and competitive than ever before. Design Thinking – a proven and effective process for creating new and potentially valuable ideas for products, services and more – may be just the tool your organization needs to be more successful within the increasingly innovation-based economy.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2008 edition of the HSMAI Marketing Review, the premier publication of the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International – HSMAI. To learn more, visit HSMAI at www.hsmai.org.