Redefining Manufacturing: The Design Thinking Advantage

Many business leaders continue to prioritise, yet few are satisfied with their businesses’ innovation skills. Many businesses experiment with innovation approaches brought in from the outside in their desire to become more innovative. In recent years, one of these sought-after innovation methodologies has been design thinking which is a mindset and a set of tools for innovation and development. Design thinking has created spectacular achievements in creative organisations like design consultancies and service firms but it has shown to be significantly more difficult to execute in large, established firms, especially if the organisational culture opposes the ideals that underpin design thinking. We demonstrate how a large, manufacturer of farm equipment’s enterprises over a period of five years morphed the design thinking methodology to allow it to take root in many sectors of the organisation and become an intrinsic element of the firm’s innovation activities over time by including design thinking into their strategic plan, leadership programmes and into day-to-day activity. This paper also throws some light on other approaches which can be used for adopting design thinking in large organisations.