An Operations Management Perspective on Design Thinking

An Operations Management Perspective on Design Thinking provides a map of what is known about mechanisms of design thinking when looking through an operations management lens and identifies areas where knowledge gaps still exist. In applying the operations management lens, the author constructs a simple framework for how to assess progress in design thinking activities. To provide improved design thinking progress measures, the author expands this framework by considering multiple dimensions of these measures in greater detail: the outcomes of an operation and its transformation function. Applying the reference set to these multiple dimensions of the expanded framework identifies contributions from other disciplines that can help explain the conditions under which design thinking operations can be managed successfully and pinpoints unexplained gaps that are worthy of future research.

The monograph first prepares the methodological ground by putting the attempt to search for better design thinking process measures in the context of existing research approaches. The next section summarizes the origins and characteristics of design thinking and provides an overview of the progress measures that have been proposed for design thinking. The monograph then introduces an operations management perspective for design thinking as an innovation production process. The next section expands this perspective by introducing multiple dimensions and finer grained measures and apply this extended framework to the data set from earlier sections to pull together the current understanding of design thinking and to identify future research opportunities. The monograph concludes with some broader reflections.