363. The Transformative Power of Design feat. Vijay Kumar

Dec 1, 2023

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Far from just making things pretty, design has become an essential part of strategy and now has a dynamic role in organizations. It’s not just about design; it's about the transformative power of design.

Vijay Kumar is Charles Owen Endowed Chair and Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also the author of 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization, a comprehensive toolbox that equips you with the understanding and tools to tackle your projects with a design mindset.

Vijay and Greg dive into the complexities of design education, blending intuitive, collaborative, and scientific techniques, and how systems thinking is an absolute must-have for success. Vijay brings to light how top-down leadership, when married with bottom-up innovation champions, can shift mindsets towards innovation.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

The levels of impact of innovation

14:04: In my work, I think of these impacts in organizations at three levels: creating awareness, which is creating the basic awareness about how innovation happens, and looking at some examples and looking at successes and failures is good, that awareness gives you some basics to start your journey. But the next level is experience, awareness alone is not enough for you to practice. The experience level is: can we give people some experience, a hands-on experience? [15:27] Now, the next level is creating competence. Like creating competence, you have to go into a deeper level of understanding of all these methods, and it is a multi-year or perpetual activity that you need to engage and to absorb the competence of innovation methods and tools to make new things happen.

Rethinking design innovation in a world of minimalism

12:48: The idea of design innovation, on a minimalistic level, loses its richness; it loses the essence of the power of design. The simplification is that the whiteboards, post-it notes, and a one-day workshop. But the fact and the impact are so minimal in my understanding.

How can we encourage innovative thinking?

09:19: The executives or the leaders who have bought into the idea of the importance of innovation can make a big difference in influencing their team and the other folks working in the organization by constantly giving examples or demonstrations or talking about the impact the design of the innovation could have on the company's offerings. That's one direction—the top-down direction of influence.

How do we foster ownership?

29:08: Ownership of people's actions takes place when they first-hand experience the value of something. So the engineers that are doing research on the field suddenly become part of the field, doing interviews, talking to customers, and getting insights. So, they take ownership of that process by immersing themselves in that context. So ownership is a big part of my belief that, in order to give ownership, you have to make people participate in these diverse types of activities.

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