DESIGN:Ireland has an opportunity to develop its national cultural aptitudes for human understanding, empathy and creativity, writes FRANK DEVITT

WE MAY BE out of money but we have a plentiful natural resource that can help industry revive and thrive. Empathy and human understanding are essential to sustainable modern innovation, and they are valued by leading innovating businesses.

These innate Irish abilities provide a compelling differentiation in modern business innovation, where they operate in tandem with technological and organisational prowess to ensure business viability for all innovations. This is “design thinking innovation” and Ireland can be a leader in this practice.

Necessity is the mother of invention and the customer is king. Over the last half century, leading companies and countries have turned to design to marry these two adages. Design has always been about shaping the physical world to the satisfaction of human needs, physical and emotional. Its key role has been to find the balance between technology (invention) and humanity (the customer).

While traditional design explicitly brings the humanity of the user into a firm’s products, design thinking in modern innovation transcends this and strategically embeds socio-cultural understanding and (sustainable) business viability deep into the business innovation processes. It achieves this through invoking well-determined principles, values, behaviours and processes derived from, but no longer confined to, traditional design practices.

Design thinkers don’t have to be designers.

Design thinking values include human-centricity, deep user understanding, valid solutions, holism, divergence and integration. Characteristic behaviours are discovering real needs through intensive observation, early and repeated experimenting, visualising, collaborating and creatively stimulating. The main competencies required are empathy, creativity and integrative thinking.

Rather than “inventing” a solution too early, a design thinker seeks to adopt and/or adapt existing resources, whether goods or service or combination, while all the time emphasising sustainable business viability.

Through design thinking, empathy and human understanding have become key drivers of 21st-century business innovation. This is good news for Ireland because we have for a long time traded on these innate abilities in literature, drama, storytelling and other cultural areas. Marrying these traditional qualities with recently acquired competence in technology, and combined with good business management, produces a world-class combination that is ideal for 21st-century innovation.

And there is no net extra government expenditure needed to build a national capability in design thinking. A small portion of existing science and technology RD expenditures can be redeployed in a more balanced innovation budget to make an impact.

Even more good news is that design thinking gives excellent results in any sector, providing economy-wide innovation stimulus.

The main obstacle to becoming a leader in the area would be persistence with techno-fetishist approaches to innovation, using the phrase coined by Amar Bhide of Columbia University. This implies a (mistaken) belief that all innovation derives from RD in science and technology. There must be a (modest) re-apportioning of RD budgets to accommodate training, education and research in design-thinking practice and management.

Companies and countries that excel at innovation have already adopted the principles of design-thinking innovation, including Denmark, Finland, the UK and the US; Apple, Samsung, Procter Gamble, Google and others.

The Innovation Taskforce recognised the value of design but stopped short of giving it the prominence or call to action design thinking deserves. Where product design requires specialist training and the building of a culture to support it, design thinking is a management, organisational and behavioural approach to innovation that is more amenable to broader understanding, competence development and economic impact. It should be a focus of the €1.4 million management development fund recently announced by Minister Batt O’Keeffe. Happily, the NSAI (National Standards Authority of Ireland) is already convenor of an international working group on Design Thinking in Innovation Management for CEN, the European standards body.

Ireland has an opportunity to develop its national cultural aptitudes for human understanding, empathy and creativity, which are internationally acclaimed and amply demonstrated in literature, drama and art.

These attributes must be exploited in transformational business innovation through design thinking. They they provide essential differentiation, and they can be mobilised at relatively low cost.

And, these investments are modest compared to traditional science and technology supports. The key element is education and training, at masters level and for executive management respectively. A national roll-out of executive education, particularly for SMEs, could have dramatic results.

Frank Devitt is head of the Department of Design and Innovation at NUI Maynooth