Design thinking for innovation: Practices and intermediate outcomes

Abstract As an approach to creative problem solving, design thinking (DT) has received much attention in the practitioner and academic literature. It appears to be especially well‐suited to the challenges facing the nonprofit sector. Despite the increasing interest in this method, scholarly literature about the actual effectiveness of DT is minimal. Most common output‐oriented measures of innovativeness (e.g., number of new product introductions or number of patents) used to show the impact of DT do not capture the perceived benefits of using DT. The review of existing literature points to the need for a more nuanced exploration of the mechanisms behind DT's effectiveness for innovation and performance by identifying the intermediate outcomes. The research discussed in this paper contributes to DT literature by identifying and assessing DT practices and intermediate outcomes and assessing the relationship between them in a diverse sample of practitioners from business, government, and nonprofit sectors. Our findings demonstrate that DT practices are associated with a rich and varied array of positive intermediate outcomes—not only for those being designed for but also for the innovators using it, their teams and organizations, and even the larger systems in which they operate. Team formation and functioning, Discovery and Ideation, and Prototyping and Experimentation practices were associated with the following intermediate outcomes: improved implementation and adaptation, individual psychological benefits, network capability and resource enhancement, increased solution quality, and trust‐building.