The document discusses the paradox of innovation in corporations, where there is a public claim of excellence but private concerns about performance. It emphasizes the design thinking approach as a teachable process for innovation that begins with empathy towards users' emotions and experiences, contrasting with traditional logic-based methodologies. Through modeling, prototyping, and testing, companies can foster innovation and improve productivity while understanding that thoughtful restraint in design can lead to more effective solutions.

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Innovation is a bit of a paradox. Publicly, corporations claim to
excel at it. But privately, they fret they’re doing it poorly. Compli-
cating matters further, the incessant march of well-funded com-
panies from Silicon Valley attempting to “eat the world” means
the penalty for falling short has never been higher.
In survey after survey, global executives rank innovation at the
top of their long-term business imperatives. But how, exactly,
does innovation happen? Does one need what Jackson Pollack
brought to an 18’ canvas or, as Hemingway said of Fitzgerald
in A Moveable Feast, “talent as natural as the pattern that was
made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings?”
Steve Jobs might argue yes. But fortunately for the rest of us,
Design Thinking - a concept whose practitioners and evangelists
are rapidly swelling - argues the opposite. It claims innovation is
a process that can be taught to anyone, assuming they have a
capacity for empathy and the ability to temporarily place their
ego on a shelf.
In this paper, we will explore the tenets of Design Thinking and
examine how they can be applied at mature corporations grap-
pling with legacy IT landscapes and fragmented workforces.
Design
Thinking:
An Approach
To Innovation
That Scales
- By Gaurav Palta and Suraj Ramaprasad -
CONSULTING
What exactly is Design Thinking?
When one googles ‘Design Thinking’, they quickly discover it’s
much easier to find flattering platitudes than a definition of
the actual thing. Indeed, as one teacher said to another as they
walked out of a conference on Design Thinking, “I think I missed
something. I still don’t understand what design thinking is. Do
you?” The other teacher shook her head and said, “I think it’s a
curriculum, but I’m not really sure.”
To help bridge the gap, a concise definition can be distilled from
Stanford’s d.school, a department fully dedicated to Design
Thinking’s tenets. In short, Design Thinking is an iterative process
with five basic components:
1. Choose a target set of users and explore the
emotional basis of their experiences
(i.e. empathize)
2. Create models to define and explain these
experiences
3. Brainstorm solutions with the potential to
improve these experiences
4. Rapidly prototype these solutions, exhibiting
thoughtful restraint
5. Test the solutions, promoting the good ones
and eliminating the bad ones
Source: http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/
EMPATHIZE
PROTOTYPEDEFINE
TEST
IDEATE
The Design Thinking Framework

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Start with Empathy
As stated, DesignThinking begins with exploration of the emotion-
al basis of a set of users. Said more simply, one must walk a mile in
someone else’s shoes.
To do this effectively, practitioners must place their ego to the side
and empathize with users’ experiences. What brings them joy and
frustration during a given experience? How do the tools and tech-
nology they interact with make them feel?
From a problem definition perspective, this is fundamentally dif-
ferent from the logic-based business thinking that has traditionally
driven product development. Historically, product managers have
made their living correlating quantifiable features with measure-
able benefits: state the problem, define the solution that directly
solves the problem.
To demonstrate, let’s examine how people heat their homes. From
a business thinking point-of-view, we observe that by installing a
furnace, we can warm people inside a house. And by attaching it
to a thermostat with lots of functionality (i.e. buttons), we can en-
able people to control their heating schedule with a high degree of
precision. The combination of these two elements should theo-
retically lead to an optimal end-product, and indeed is where the
industry has spent the past 25 years.
Thermostat company Nest, however, took a different approach. As
Nest CEO Tony Fadell said to Inc. magazine, “At the end of the day,
you have to espouse a feeling – in your advertisements, in your
products. And that feeling comes from your gut.”
What Nest realized is that many people feel a twinge of stress
each time they look at their thermostat as they contemplate the
responsibility of programming complex thermostats to accom-
modate changing seasons and vacation schedules.
Nest translated this emotional insight into a product that disrupt-
ed an industry. Eschewing complexity, Nest released an elegantly
simple product that learns people’s preferences and eventually
goes on an auto-pilot, making users feel liberated, thrifty and
tech-savvy. That’s something that can’t be accomplished through
the addition of more buttons. And it can’t be understood without
empathy.
Source: Seton Innovation & Technology Commercialization Team
Problem ProblemUnderstandSolution Solution
DESIGN THINKING
ABDUCTIVE
THINKING
BUSINESS THINKING

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Create Models
Emotional insights are often earned through interviews and ob-
servations from several members of a team. To eventually enable
innovation, these insights must travel from the disparate minds
where they originated into a shared, lucid model. Traditionally,
teams would turn to tools such as PowerPoint, which do a nice job
articulating linear process flows and neatly bullet-pointed narra-
tives. But the messy reality is that real world problems often aren’t
linear.
Practitioners of Design Thinking accepted this, and have instead
turned to collaborative model building. Teams organize sticky
notes on a board with joining arrows or draw free-form flow dia-
grams capturing the activities within an ecosystem and the emo-
tional responses that result. Fundamentally, humans communi-
cate through stories. Design Thinking models enable teams to tell
the story of their customers’journeys.
The insight- generating potential of modeling was observed by a
recent Infosys Consulting team doing an engagement with a lead-
ing global software company.The company, which prides itself on
being a learning organization, realized that somewhere along the
way it had somehow forgotten how to learn. Engagement metrics
with learning management modules were down, and, as people
often derive positive energy from personal growth, morale was
weak.
The initial response of the software company was to implement a
fresh learning management application with more bells and whis-
tles than the incumbent. They selected a vendor and hired Infosys
Consulting to come in for program delivery.
When the Infosys team arrived, however, they felt something was
amiss. Talking with employees at either end of the engagement
spectrum, they realized people at the firm were unhappy with the
fundamental structure of workplace learning.
To model employee’s feelings, the Infosys Consulting team dis-
tilled the results of their dozens of interviews into five distinct per-
sonas, giving each a full identity and a name (e.g.“Cecilia the Cyn-
ic”, “Lucie the Ladder Climber”). They then mapped the way each
persona interacted with learning and identified the spot where
the process seemed to break down. The amalgamation of these
models led to a crucial insight: people wanted to learn in a way
that flowed seamlessly between work and play instead of exiling
learning to an isolated box requiring them to stop their work and
shift to an alternate application.
Rapidly Prototype
and Test Solutions
Building on these core insights, the consulting team began rapid-
ly ideating and implementing new ways of naturally embedding
learning into the flow of the lives of the five personas. Fully func-
tional masterpieces were skipped in favor of basic prototypes that
could quickly be put in front of users to evaluate engagement.
To do this honestly, many solutions must be put in front of users,
and most of them need to be quickly acknowledged as failures.
For this to stick, a team’ s culture needs to remove any negative
stigma from solutions that don’t work. If not, individuals will stop
taking risks or will try to internally sell mediocre solutions, and the
wrong ideas will win.
The team began building and rolling out new learning solutions
to subsets of each persona. Some ideas, like impromptu, mo-
bile-enabled matchmaking between employees of similar inter-
ests to encourage “Montessori for adults”, failed within certain
segments but received high marks in others. Other solutions, such
as pushing five blog posts that align with employees’professional
and personal interests exactly when they had a 30-minute break
in their calendar, were quickly picked up and rolled out to the larg-
er organization.
Ontological Design
Meets Big Data
In a sense, Design Thinking borrows core tenets from ontological
design, which is the concept that what you design, designs you
back. By respecting the natural flow of employees’days and using
technology to embed learning in a natural way, one can tap into
people’s innate desire to become a better version of themselves.
Putting this into practice, Infosys Consulting experts were recently
on an engagement where they were confronted with a large mo-
bile workforce of millennial technicians tasked with supporting
customers in the field.
The technicians were following a multi-step process to resolve
customer issues: they first identified issues at customer sites and
then passed them to back-office staff for instructions on how to
resolve. While theoretically efficient – detailed knowledge could
be concentrated with fewer people – the approach resulted in
slow resolution times and stunted both the natural rhythms and
the morale of the technicians.
The team observed this and prototyped a solution to place diag-
nostic tools directly in the hands of technicians. By cataloguing
the knowledge embedded in the firm, they realized they could
leverage artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to supply workers
with accurate “digital assistants”on their iPhones. This innovation
enabled technicians to diagnose and solve problems on the fly,
resulting in reduced customer wait times, a $6 million annual re-
duction in support costs and happier, more engaged workers.

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Exhibit Thoughtful Restraint
One of the biggest temptations in product design is to continue
adding features until no possible need is left unmet. The reality,
however, is that this approach leads to bloated products that
please no one. Design Thinking encourages teams to search for
the vital features in a solution and to resist the temptation to add
those that aren’t necessary.
In Paris, there is a famous restaurant in the heart of Saint Germain
des Pres that has thrived for decades called Le Relais de l’Entre-
cote. Instead of following the highly sanctified precedents of
French cuisine that call for a broad selection of traditional favor-
ites, the restaurant serves only one thing: steak frites. When diners
are seated, a waitress approaches their table and asks two ques-
tions: how they’d like their meat cooked and what they’d like to
drink (the latter often satisfied with a simple response of “carafe
of vin rouge”). To dine here is to experience freedom. Your needs
are fully met – a nice salad arrives first, followed by delicious en-
trecote smothered in a secret green sauce with a side of perfect
frites – yet you’re completely unencumbered by the responsibility
of correctly navigating a list of choices laced with implicit relation-
ships and potential pitfalls.
Examples can certainly be found in the tech world as well: Uber
asks a single question of “Where To?”, and Square Cash simply
wants to know who you’re sending cash to and for how much.
These apps provide singular utility and have distanced themselves
from peers trying to be all things to all people. To paraphrase an
old adage, it’s often what you don’t include that matters.
The Design Premium
To place a tangible value on the power of design-led innovation,
the Design Management Institute, an international organization
that focuses on cross-functional design, measured the perfor-
mance of companies committed to design as an integral part
of their business strategy relative to the broader market. To do
this, they tracked the performance of a $10,000 investment in
design-led companies relative to the overall S&P 500. Incredibly,
over the past 10 years, design-led companies have outperformed
the S&P 500 by an emphatic 211%. (See chart below.)
There is no question companies have plenty of challenges as they
move forward in today’s digital age. As Vishal Sikka, CEO of Info-
sys, recently stated, “Businesses are facing an increasing sprawl in
their IT landscapes, while at the same time trying to free up resources
into new areas that are critical for their future. A new set of resources
is a necessary essential to addressing this multi-dimensional chal-
lenge.”
To enable technical innovation, companies certainly need to put
a proper foundation in place: stable, interconnected platforms
with clean, accessible data. But by combining these elements
with design-led innovation, they can enable themselves to create
innovative solutions that both harness the power of big data and
bring joy to employees and customers, thereby setting the table
for ongoing corporate success.
06/2005 06/06 06/07 06/08 06/09 06/10 06/11 06/12 06/13 06/14 06/15 12/15
DESIGN VALUE INDEX; 2005-2015
$ 45.000
$ 40.000
$ 35.000
$ 30.000
$ 25.000
$ 20.000
$ 15.000
$ 10.000
DVI
S&P 500
211%
Source: http://www.dmi.org/?DesignValue

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CONSULTING
Gaurav Palta
Partner – Strategy and Design Practice,
Infosys Consulting (U.S.)
Gaurav heads the enterprise AI practice for In-
fosys Consulting in the U.S. His practice blends
design thinking with cutting edge AI capabili-
ties to create transformational shifts in experi-
ence and productivity for customers and the
workforce. A cornerstone of the practice is how
Suraj Ramaprasad
Partner – Energy, Communications and
Services Practice,
Infosys Consulting (Europe, Asia)
Suraj Ramaprasad is a partner in the Energy,
Communications, Utilities and Services prac-
tice for Infosys Consulting, overseeing a diverse
portfolio of transformation work for some of
the biggest global corporations across Europe
About the Authors
“purposeful AI”is shaping the future of work, where solutions amplify humans
to achieve deeper engagement and continuous learning. His areas of focus in-
clude hi-tech, manufacturing, retail and services, having supported numerous
Fortune 100 clients through their automation journeys. He also partners with
leading product, platform and IoT companies to create viable go to market
solutions.
and Asia. He has a 20 year background in management consulting and his
expertise ranges from the oil and gas industry, to the utilities, resources and
telecommunications sectors. Suraj’s focus and passion is helping senior ex-
ecutives identify value leakage resulting from information asymmetry and
organizational silos, and designing transformation programs to deliver value
uplift. In addition, his teams are constantly developing innovation concepts
on how to leverage the power of digital in areas such as industry business
platforms, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence.