IDEO Design Thinking Breaks the Productivity Frontier 242.0

Consultants’ advice on productivity improvement, as branded management products, evolve from new insights found in social science research and in empirical practice.

IDEO’s Design Thinking is one such clear and late stage innovation in the business’s search for continuous productivity improvement.

Design Thinking’s success and arrival in the Philippines is evidenced by entry into local management lingo of its two core concepts of ideation and rapid prototyping. These I have posted in SYNTHESiST before and will discuss further below.

As I noted in the previous post on Six Sigma and productivity, as knowledge work, improves itself through this continuous learning.

Evolution of improvement insights. In the early 1990s, Six Sigma grew from engineering-based improvements in the factories like Frederick Taylor’s scientific management and were applied to business process too.

At about the same time, James Champy’s business process re-engineering became a popular outgrowth and showed that overhead processes as a richer field to harvest productivity improvements versus than factory operations.

Japanese productivity techniques. A decade earlier, the Toyota Production systems likewise was translated into English as JIT, TQC, TPM, SMED, Quality Circles and techniques like Kaizen and Pokayoke.

These Japanese shop floor techniques have now become standard tools for productive companies all over the world. They have become foundation knowledge for later techniques in the continuing search for areas for productivity improvement – product development.

QFD and concurrent engineering. Later on, concurrent engineering and quality function deployment (QFD) were likewise uncovered that moved beyond factory operations and engineering into the realm of product development.

QFD tied customer needs to internal product specs with a method to identifying the details of customer needs and reducing them to the most important and priority ones.

Later in the development process, concurrent engineering imported experts from the different functional silos like product, process, quality and industrial engineering fields with operations managers into one development team thus the term “concurrent.”

This team approach reduced developed time by as much as 60% as highlighted by the Japanese experience versus the Western ones.

IDEO and Design Thinking. Design used to be an add-on step to add aesthetics to developed products.

Stepping beyond concurrent engineering and QFD, IDEO made much of the market research associated with product development concurrent to the design process further shortening development-to-market cycle times but more importantly embedding much of customer needs into the product as their inputs are considered before the design is frozen (as in the early development and design mode).

IDEO considers the design process human centered. It passes through three stages: inspiration, ideation and implementation.

As with concurrent engineering, the inspiration stage involves a multi-disciplinary team to try, divine and define a human level concept of the product.

Ideation, the next stage, is the process of generating, developing and testing ideas that may lead to a solution.

To test different product concepts, the ideation stage uses rapid prototyping as the preferred tool.

Rapid prototyping does not involve creating a complete sample as the stage-gate approach to product development would do. Instead, the team quickly produces physical, visual or procedural models of the product aspect under consideration and gets the team to make a human-centered evaluation.

Finally, the implementation stage develops a “path to market” for the product idea including the specifying and process.

The design thinking approach of starting the design process – including validation by customers with prototypes – within the development cycle results into innovative products brought to market quickly.

The Indians used a variation to rapid prototyping with computer simulations like the India Tata Nano. By avoiding traditional prototypes and using computerized models India Tata was able to produce the Nano at the very low target price.

Final words. For most countries, productivity improvement – except for city states like Hongkong and Singapore dependent on trade – is the true source of improvements in living standards.

Thus, a continuous search for productivity improvement is the way of life for most political economies.

From recent history with business process re-engineering and design thinking, the next major stage of improvement will likely be where a key factor of competition like proportion of cost, quality, cycle times or customer service or a convergence in a product or service.

SYNTHESiST is interested to see where the next nexus of productivity improvement will be.