Open Innovation vs. Design Thinking

At WE THINQ, We work with a lot of change makers who are always looking for new and better ways to achieve results. Open innovation is our go-to process to see change, but there are other methods used to inspire creative problem solving. Design thinking is a widely used process based on the premise that everyone can be part of creating a more desirable future. Both design thinking and open innovation are used to create positive changes in organisations and communities. So what is the difference between these two methods and how can you choose which is right for your project or organisation?

Design Thinking: The People Focused Approach

Design thinking outlines a 5 step strategy to innovation:

1. Empathy: Get to know your audience. The core of design thinking involves focusing on the customer. Many ideas fail because the people who executed it were not in touch with what their community actually wanted. Depending on your project this may mean you have a variety of different groups working on the project and gathering feedback. Design thinking thrives when many different view points are explored. It may seem intimidating at first if these viewpoints seem conflicting. But design thinking thrives on exploring as many options as possible before choosing the one to implement.

2. Define: Define the problem you wish to solve. This step is not meant to be easy. Try re-defining the problem from several different angles and viewpoints. Ask different questions about the problem. Is there a better way to tackle it? It would be a shame to create a solution only to realise you were not solving the problem that needed to be solved.

3. Ideate This is the brainstorming stage. Get as many different ideas as you can from your team and your community. Let the ideas flow freely and then analyse them as a team. Once you have considered many different ideas from many angles you can decide which idea you would like to prototype.

4. Prototype Once you have chosen which idea to test, create a prototype. Both products and services should be prototyped and tested on a small group of people before making the big push.

5. Test Test out your prototype and watch change happen! Make sure you get feedback from communities. The key to design thinking is keeping in touch with what your community wants and needs. Once you are happing with the testing phase you can go ahead and implement the product or service, and then start over again!

Open Innovation: The Problem Focused Approach

Depending on your project, the process for open innovation can vary, but it generally follows these four steps:

1. Define the Challenge The core of open innovation focuses around the challenge. Take your time in defining the challenge. Once you have defined the problem that needs to be solved, you can reach out to interested team and community members to help you tackle this problem. As you can see, this is the reverse process from design thinking.

2. Outreach Once you have your challenge, reach out to people in your organisation and community to help you find the challenge. Tap in to your existing networks on social media and email. Reach out to contacts or organisations who might be interested in helping you spread the word. While the quality of ideas is the key to any innovation project, diversity is very important in open innovation. The more participants you have from different backgrounds the higher quality your pool of ideas will be.

3. Consider and Give Feedback Once all the ideas have been submitted, participants and judges can give feedback and vote on the best ideas. It is up to you how you will choose which idea to put in place. You can either vote as a community or have a team of judges decide on the most practical approach. If the goal of your project is to continually get feedback on an initiative you may choose to let the community up vote the most important issues to them.

4. Commit Once you have selected the idea(s) to implement, it is time to commit and put the project into action. This is the most important part of open innovation. If participants don’t see their ideas in action, they will be reluctant to help you again in the future. Just as in design thinking, you can prototype and test your idea before releasing it to the community.

Choosing which process to use depends on your organisation and the project you are working on. If you are looking to improve the customer experience, and find relevant problems to tackle in the community, design thinking may work better for you. However, if you already know what challenge you need to solve (for example, finding a better source of renewable energy in your community) open innovation could be the better route for you.

Both processes lead to community generated problem solving and innovation. Finding the best process depends on your project and your organisation. The core of both open innovation and design thinking centre around getting ideas from your community, rather than just the executives of an organistion. At WE THINQ, that is the approach we beleive gets the best results!

Have you used open innovation and design thinking? What did you find the differences were between the processes? The results? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!