You will prepare and submit a term paper on Design Thinking as a Methodology for Innovation. Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Design Thinking as a Methodology for Innovation. Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length. The heuristic tasks of design thinking include motivating disgruntling employees, forging supplier relationships, and understanding customer delight. It is the role of CEOs and other top business leaders to be masters of heuristics mentioned above. Designing is a tool powerful enough to bring a change. It is not just a mere tool for styling products and communications. Creative designers devise tools, actions, and methods that they use to change the existing situations into preferred ones. DT is a user-centered approach to innovation and business leadership can learn from the practice of designers. Most of the previous work on design thinking (DT) is mainly theoretical.

Organizational managers are increasingly searching for alternative approaches to innovation. As a result, the majority of these managers are focusing their interests in design. Brown (2008) has discussed how organizations can benefit from design thinking. He suggests that business managers can apply a design approach to any innovation challenge that they may encounter within the organization. Design thinking is a distinct approach, separate from other problem-solving approaches. Plattner, Meinel, and Leifer (2013) examine the aspects that distinguish design thinking from other problem-solving approaches. DT is unique because it helps foster creativity and aesthetically appealing product design. There are specific affective and cognitive processes involved when managers engage themselves in design thinking. Brown (2008) supports this view because he interprets DT as a conceptualization of the way designers think and work.

A previous study has argued that design thinking is a methodology for innovation that integrates human, technical, and business factors in problem-forming, problem-solving, and designs (Plattner et al., 2013). Another researcher argued that the design thinking approach encompasses three broad phases namely inspiration, ideation, and implementation (Brown, 2008). In the inspiration phase, the players are motivated to search for solutions.