Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value

In the book Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value, author Thomas Lockwood along with various experts explore how the design and product development strategies of the modern world we live in today have changed and adapted to the new environment around us. Thomas Lockwood is founding partner of Lockwood Resource, an international recruiting firm specializing in design and innovation leadership, and past president of DMI, the Design Management Institute.

Design Thinking at its core is a book which tries to synthesize an explanation of the active actions taken recently (for when this book was released) by industry designers who are breaking the cycle old development models in  which projects were spear headed by marketers and then passed off to the designers. This book details how designers have moved on from styling consumer products to more strategic endeavors: designing experiences, services and even business models. The ambitions reach beyond the corporate sphere, leading designers to even confront the systemic societal problems of our age: climate change, rapid urbanization, obesity… The basic logic underpinning this strategic re-framing is “Design Thinking”. According Lockwood, this “is essentially a human-centered innovation process that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping, and concurrent business analysis, which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy.” The essence being then that design thinking is a new way of thinking that builds on careful mapping of consumer needs, collaborative visualization of alternative solutions and rapid prototyping of emerging concepts, with the ultimate aim to generate more compelling customer experiences and to contribute to businesses’ top line growth. Lockwood details how the approach works even when dealing with the big societal problems, which “don’t need necessarily big solutions” but just a complete “reframing”. The fundamentals of this book are, when put simply, that modern innovation and design processes are adapting to a new brave world, and if you want to continue to be a player in the industry, adaptation is necessary.