Abstract
This article focuses on how organizations measure the impact of design thinking. The results are based on a quantitative survey that is complemented by qualitative interviews with experienced design thinkers. Even though a majority of respondents perceive some kind of impact, only a minority has tried to determine the impact in some way. Those who do not evaluate the impact, often do not know how or lack the necessary resources. The metrics of those who do measure design thinking’s impact vary considerably, but customer feedback and satisfaction is a recurring theme. We propose that the traditional means of performance measurements are often ill-suited for evaluating the impact of design thinking. We conclude with a promising industry example of how traditional measures can be used to gauge overall performance and how a story-based approach can capture the role of design thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
The data presented in this chapter is part of a larger study on the situation of design thinking in organizations and can be accessed here: http://thisisdesignthinking.net
- 2.
- 3.
If two or more participants were from the same organization, that organization was counted once.
- 4.
The strong representation of information and communication organizations might be due to the fact that many of our survey participants have or have had ties to the IT Systems Engineering division of Hasso Plattner Institute and therefore an immanent IT focus in their work. Another explanation could be that the IT sector faces high innovation pressure caused by digitization and user empowerment. From experience we know that design thinking heavily resonates in those (ICT) environments. Therefore it may not be surprising that the many responses from the IT sector are representative of its role at the forefront of organizations that have to react faster than others.
- 5.
For better readability we corrected obvious misspellings and adjusted initial capital/lowercase letters without comment according to the Chicago Manual of Style (2010). Additionally, we converted capital to lowercase letters within quoted passages for general terms and references to bodies or concepts, also without comment. Many of our respondents were not native speakers of English. Therefore, their statements might not always correspond to Standard English.
- 6.
Unfortunately, some measurements were described in terms so vague that they were impossible to interpret.
- 7.
The butterfly effect is a concept stemming from chaos theory. It postulates that small events in a complex system can have large, widespread consequences. In hindsight, it is nearly impossible to isolate specific causes (Hilborn 2004).
- 8.
The catalyst program allows employees with regular jobs but trained in design thinking—so-called innovation catalysts—to spend 10 % of their working hours to coach workshops.
- 9.
Questions based on concrete action could be: “Do you record the number of design thinking projects?” or “Do you collect customer feedback?”
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Acknowledgments
All results are part of a survey on the impact of Design Thinking in organizations. We would like to thank Prof. Hasso Plattner and the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program Committee for their support. We thank Dr. Sharon Nemeth for her editorial support.
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Schmiedgen, J., Spille, L., Köppen, E., Rhinow, H., Meinel, C. (2016). Measuring the Impact of Design Thinking. In: Plattner, H., Meinel, C., Leifer, L. (eds) Design Thinking Research. Understanding Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19641-1_11
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