Design thinking as an approach to strategy

Despite better access to data on the customers, companies are lacking customer insight and struggle to manage the increasing complexity. They work with structures that no longer fit into a global and digitised environment with changing demands, and consequently companies must reinvent themselves. Thus, companies need business processes to reduce and manage complexity as well as new ways of approaching product and service design and the way they do strategy.

Design thinking offers an approach to managing the increased complexity while simultaneously applying a human-centric creative process, to build meaningful and effective solutions. Which - strange as it may sound - is not always the case when companies design products, plan their strategy or do business in general. Often, companies look at what is technologically feasible or economically viable before they look at what the customers need or want. They get so focused on running and optimising their own business from an inside-out perspective that, along the way, they lose track of their customers’ continuously developing needs. A dynamic that can leave them with a theoretically great offering which the company has spent a great deal of time on developing and fine-tuning, but which