Design thinking

These five questions will help give your numbers meaning.

Consensus is often the enemy of innovation.

Right when we need it most, spatial skills are being taught the least.

Why designers should hope their audience is in a good mood.

Good design starts with close observation and real curiosity

Continuous improvement at Toyota Motor Company is now a business legend. For three decades, Toyota enlisted its employees in a relentless drive to find faster, more efficient methods to develop and make low-cost, defect-free cars. The results were stupendous. Toyota became the benchmark in the automobile industry for quality and low cost. The same, however, […]

Manolo Blahnik is one of the world’s most successful shoe designers. Raised by his Spanish mother and Czech father on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands, he studied law, languages, and art in Geneva and Paris before opening his London boutique in 1973. His eponymous company now has shops or department store concessions in […]

Developing a new product involves trial and error, but beyond a certain point, redesign becomes wasteful. A practical and proven tool, the Design Structure Matrix, can help streamline the way a company innovates.

It involves a Winnebago.

Three lessons to create an office people want to work in.

Three ways to cure showrooming.

While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people's biases and entrenched...

Focus on the meaning behind the numbers.

Nowhere in a company is the need for coordination more acute than between the people who are responsible for product design and those responsible for manufacturing. As Daniel E. Whitney argued in these pages recently (“Manufacturing by Design,” July–August 1988), most companies have operated for years in an environment where design and manufacturing communicate infrequently, […]

Evaluate your space, or imagine a new one.

It took a lot of planning.

How a sleep app became something users really wanted.

An example from Johns Hopkins Medicine.

You have three big challenges. You must manage them all well.

Whenever I see a business magazine glow about design thinking, as BusinessWeek has done recently with this special report, and which Harvard Business...