During the third R&D Innovation Excellence / Design Thinking Summit on 12 and 13 April in Amsterdam, PNO innovation expert Lieke Gerris will introduce PNO’s contribution to accelerating the ‘design thinking trend’, based on the 4D’s: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. PNO’s unique added value is based on an intelligent analysis of relevant, but currently unexploited innovation data with a predictive value for innovation needs.

Design Thinking Summit is leading event

The Design Thinking Summit, which is sponsored by PNO Consultants among others, is a leading event in the innovation world. Aside from innovation leaders at Johnson & Johnson, Philips, GE and Coca Cola, PNO innovation expert Lieke Gerris will be there to introduce the way PNO can enhance, improve and advance the process of design thinking.

Why design thinking and innovation are the ideal combo

Design thinking is a way to innovate towards solutions. It takes on complex problems in a customer-centric, solution-centric way. By involving multiple disciplines, giving the customer pride of place and testing and improving the solutions in several iterations, a continuous, holistic process emerges. Solutions are conceived for real-life challenges, so as to actually meet the need of a customer.

Design thinking is one of the ways of innovating intelligently. The tricky thing is, that even the customer doesn’t always know what he is waiting for. Like Henry Ford said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. This makes the challenge to always integrate new insights into design thinking based innovation processes.

Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver

The method PNO Consultants has developed, enhances the traditional 4D method: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver. Although businesses innovate ‘from the customer’ more and more, they mainly use similar methods: in the so-called Discover-phase, customers are interviewed and market reports are analysed. Although this results in a reasonable view on current problems and desires in markets, it says nothing about the needs, problems and solutions in light of current and future trends.

PNO uses intelligence to chart short and long term innovation trends (Discover) and to integrate this in the analysis of customer and market needs (Define), to see how new external stakeholders can be involved in technological development (Develop) and ensure the necessary funding to realise the innovation (Deliver). By connecting these steps to intelligence based on unexplored resources, the impact of design thinking sometimes even increases exponentially.

Want to know more?

We are glad to explain the plusses of this new service to attendees. However, if you are not able to attend the Design Thinking Summit, we would also love to meet you and tell you more about our approach – at your office or one of our many offices across Europe. Feel free to contact us.