Building on Design Thinking: The Contribution of Creativity & Knowledge. A Study of two Innovation Workshops

This paper explores design thinking’s specific contribution to innovation. The data is drawn from two studies, the first was on multi-disciplinary teams of students selected on the basis of their individual creativity levels. Half the teams used a design thinking methodology to solve a well-defined design challenge and the results in terms of innovative content were compared to those of similar teams solving the same challenge but without using design thinking. The results suggest that design thinking does improve team innovation scores and we suggest why this is the case. In the second study, two teams of students applied design thinking to an ill-defined problem that relied on the acquisition of knowledge to solve it. One of the teams adopted a superior knowledge acquisition strategy which resulted in them developing a more innovative concept and their approach to collaborative knowledge building is discussed.