Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 2009

Christiane Drews, Independent Design Strategist, Specialising in Product Innovation and Development Strategy

What is the mindset that leads a company toward design thinking? How do designers use design thinking, and what are its uses for the larger business community? Researcher and consultant Christiane Drews interviewed 13 experts from business, business education, research, and design, as well as managers and acknowledged leaders, and found a significant gap between the numeric business people and the emotional (and mostly qualitatively oriented) "creatives." At the same time, she discovered, interviewees from a business background prized the urge to create something new as a key benefit, believing that "radical platform changes are what businesses need when the time comes to move forward and reinvent." Drews tries to show how designers' ability to visualize new ideas, concepts, and models is crucial to getting many stakeholders involved; designers know how to make ideas tangible and help to decrease the high risk factor of new and radical ideas. She also suggests that the U.S. is ahead of Europe when it comes to implementing design thinking, possibly because American education has a longer history of ties between business and design institutions.

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