With the societies facing several forces of change disrupting the current societal structures simultaneously, also the global business world is facing a great innovation challenge – how to transform the current business to be more sustainable or develop completely new sustainable and commercially viable business paths where sustainability can even be a competitive advantage. Design thinking as an innovation approach has many qualities that are interesting in the context of this sustainability transition, such as its problem-centric nature and focus on the user, but for some reason academic research on utilizing design thinking in sustainable innovation processes has been limited.
This study examines the role of design thinking in the development of sustainability-oriented innovations – what are the ways in which design thinking can benefit sustainability-oriented innovation processes and support them in the challenges they typically face. The study was executed as a qualitative case study of Planet Centric Design -approach, which is an example of a sustainable design framework. The research material has been collected in six interviews with the developers and users of the framework.
The findings validate several benefits suggested by earlier research on the potential of design thinking, which include and are not limited to design thinking’s abilities to address complex and systemic issues, facilitate stakeholder discussions and to take user-centric perspectives into account, thus improving the odds to change user behaviour to be more sustainable. The findings support these theories and discover further benefits from the use of design thinking approach, such as enhancing creativity among stakeholders. In the research, it was also discovered that design thinking in sustainability-oriented innovation processes benefit from clearly defined design principles that can be applied flexibly. A development area of a lack of KPI systems is recognised in the study, as the findings and earlier research show that the benefits of design thinking in sustainability-oriented innovations are difficult to measure due to their intangible nature.
Design thinking principles can be widely beneficial in the development of sustainable innovations and in improving systemic understanding of the operating environments. Furthermore, the roles that facilitation and diverse stakeholder discussions play in the value creation should not be undermined.
