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International Journal of Design Vol. 11 No. 2 2017

Capturing the Value of Design Thinking in Different Innovation Practices

end in line with the stories that the other scholars told about this

card. This also shows that the card set led to accurate discourse

on design thinking.

Accuracy According to the Affected Users

( = the Innovators)

Most innovators agreed on the wording of the cards. They

disagreed only on a few occasions. For example, one innovator,

reﬂecting on the card

mix creativity with analytical reasoning

, said

that the statement was poor. He proceeded to explain how will,

emotion, empathy and inspiration are all part of creativity and

should be included in the mix. Although he initially perceived the

statement on the card as poor, it allowed for a rich explanation of

how this statement is applied in his daily practice. This example is

illustrative of the high-perceived accuracy of the cards according

to the innovators.

Conclusion Study 2

In Study 2, we evaluated the card set based on the card selection

procedures of the scholars and the innovators. The quantitative

analysis of the card selection procedures showed that the selection

of cards that are essential and/or unique was quite random. In

other words, no subset of cards in the set represents the core of

what design thinking is. This shows that the richness of the card

set was necessary to capture the extensiveness of the concept of

design thinking; the richness was needed for an agreed domain of

discourse on design thinking.

Regarding the completeness of the card set, it can also be

concluded that both scholars and innovators found the card set to

be quite complete. The scholars and innovators made four types

of additions to the card set. The ﬁrst group consisted of cards that

reformulate existing cards in order to improve the accuracy of the

set. The added cards in the second group included a more speciﬁc

description of a design activity described on one of the original

cards. The third group consisted of added cards with statements

that cannot be linked one-to-one to design activities. The fourth

group of cards consisted of additions to the original set. In total,

ten cards belong to this category (see Appendix D).

The scholars and the innovators also commented on the

accuracy of the card set. Although some scholars and innovators

mentioned the complexity of the statements on the cards, they

understood what these statements meant. We concluded this

since the stories that they told us based on the statements were

related to the meaning that we gave to the card. None of the cards

were criticised and/or reformulated by multiple scholars and/or

innovators, which suggests that the scholars and the innovators

deem the cards accurate. Future research could test whether

simplifying some of the statements could improve the accuracy

of the card set.

Based on the analysis above, about the completeness and

accuracy of the card set as the main quality indicators for an

agreed domain of discourse, it can be concluded that the current

cards functioned quite well as an agreed domain of discourse for

design thinking.

Study 3:

The Practical Application of

Design Thinking in Innovation

The card set on design thinking proved to function as an agreed

domain of discourse and, as such, could be used to understand

its value in different innovation practices. This section reports on

a third study that aimed to gain a better understanding of how

innovators apply design thinking in their daily innovation practice.

This study was executed with the same group of innovators

that also participated in Study 2. This third study was executed

immediately after Study 2 (with the same card deck). During the

interview, the interviewer asked the innovator to reﬂect on the 10

unique cards that the respondent selected and explain how s/he

applied the design activity in his/her daily innovation practices.

This resulted in 33 interviews on the application of design thinking

in the innovation practices of the innovators. The interviews with

the innovators lasted between 35 and 120 min. The interviews

were recorded and transcribed (±193,000 words).

Data Analysis

A ﬁrst analysis of the rich stories of the innovators on how they

apply design thinking in their innovation practices led to two new

insights. First, we discovered that the

application

of the design

activities sometimes differed because the innovation practices

were different. Second, the application of the design activities

was not unique. We found that innovators who face similar

challenges within their innovation practices use design thinking

for similar purposes during innovation. Based on these insights,

we concluded that in order to create an understanding of the

application of design thinking in innovation, it was important to

make the stories of the innovators themselves the unit of analysis

The Construction of the Images of Design Thinking

In order to categorise the stories of the innovators sensibly, we

adopted a procedure that is similar to family resemblance sorting

(Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Categories that are created via family

resemblance are fuzzy categories in which members are generally

similar to each other, but there is no set of deﬁning properties

that would be shared by all members of the category (Medin,

Wattenmaker, & Hampson, 1987, p. 243). In relation to this

study, there were no examples of innovators all selecting the same

design activities; the similarity between them is that they share

a vision and innovation challenges. For example, innovator #6

(UX designer in the ﬁeld of software and services), innovator #16

(senior specialist in NPD processes in the aerospace industry),

and innovator #17 (head of design in an IT company) (for more

details see Appendix C) all juggle different expressions of value

throughout the (new) product development process. Design

thinking facilitates dealing with the increasing complexity of their

products and the business processes in which they are involved.

Design thinking facilitates collaborations between organisational

departments and in taking along all stakeholders in the problem

context to ensure progress. Due to the similarity of the challenges,

and the similar ways they apply design thinking, they belong to

one category.