Assessing Design Thinking's Impact

Design Thinking is a methodology of growing interest to both management scholars and organizations, yet little rigorous research on its efficacy in practice has been conducted, though anecdotal reports of success are numerous. This article reports on the development and preliminary testing of a new instrument aimed at identifying more systematically the outcomes associated with use of the design thinking methodology. It encompasses multiple level of analysis and identifies a significant set of effects at individual, team, organizational and system levels. It also suggests the presence of a small number of “super practices” that hold the potential for maximizing the effectiveness of the methodology across the different outcomes, and offers preliminary insight into what degree of competence is necessary to achieve them. Finally, it offers initial support for a framing of design thinking as a “social technology,” rather than merely a set of attitudes, tools and processes. In doing so, it begins to address what has been a universally acknowledged gap in the literature and is an important challenge for practitioners as well: the development of more systematic, quantitatively rigorous assessments of DT’s impacts in practice.