Design Thinking in the Automotive Industry. Creativity and Innovation

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Chapter 5.2. Innovativeness of Design Thinking Teams:

The second part of the interviews focused on the innovativeness of Design Thinking teams. As proposed in section 3.2.1 team's innovativeness is measured with two categories - creativity and implementation. The overview of concepts and categories is given in Table 4. Furthermore, efficiency is added as a new category. Overall, the assumption that the sample might vary in innovativeness is confirmed by the data. Out of 14 projects, 8 are clustered into the highly innovative project group and the remaining 6 are less innovative projects. The clustering procedure is based on the coding procedure and explained in the following [.].
To the category creativity lower order categories namely incremental and radical ideas were added to the template. Incremental idea is explained by the two concepts "the outcome is not surprising but feasible and tendentially new" and "applying an existing solution, technology or idea to a new field" whereas radical idea consists of the concepts "develop something new for the world", "fascinate people within and outside the company" and "the solution is creative rather than obvious". With this differentiation of incremental or radical idea a first evaluation of the innovativeness could be made.
The second category of team's innovativeness - implementation - is coded by the concept "implement parts of the project or the whole prototype". Design Thinking projects often aim to generate a lot of different ideas at the beginning of the project which are clustered or further developed later on. This process leads to more than one solution, outcome or prototype. Hence, a project could be implemented partially and still it is considered as a holistic implementation of the whole project.
"Well, out of 24 ideas we have chosen 4 ideas. There was a very close cooperation with the managing director [.]. It was really important to make sure that the implementation is realized. We have finished the project with an implementation workshop. [.] There, we have thought about what is the minimal viable product to implement. Falsely, sometimes they think that they have to implement the whole project ideas at once. That is why we made sure that a version is existent which is at the market very quickly. [One idea] for example is at the [.] market already. [.]." (interviewee_16, project_10).
Termination of the project prior implementation was added to the template as a category which corresponds to implementation. Two concepts - "no implementation of the solution or idea" and "it was not the goal to implement the idea" - describe termination as an alternative to implementation. Since Design Thinking was new to some of the employees, they applied Design Thinking in the project to evaluate the methodology itself and to develop new ideas. In such cases the goal of implementation was secondary and not perceived as something important for the success of the project.
"[the question of the implementation stage] could not be answered very well because there was no implementation of the ideas planned at the first place. This means that it was clear to everybody that we want to test the method and that we want to evaluate which additional value we can generate with the method for our projects in our department. [.] This was my goal which I accomplished. [.]." (interviewee_6, project_6).
In addition to creativity and implementation, efficiency as a new category of team's innovativeness emerged during the data analysis. Participants explain that through the Design Thinking method they were able to implement prototypes very quickly at a very low level of expenses compared to other projects. Money and time savings are realized by test drives and early feedback iterations within the multidisciplinary team. They described that the efficiency of getting results (i.e. an innovation) is increased by Design Thinking if they compare their outputs with other projects in the company. Those explanations recurred in only 3 projects, however, those participants stressed that it is very important information. Thus, efficiency is described by the concepts "work at a low level of expenses" and "get results very quickly".
"[.] we tried [the prototype] out. We started to build it directly. [.]. Interestingly, this is why we saved time. And we realized it with very low expenses, although you did not believe in it at the first try. That is a very important information. [.] We were able to develop it by investing a third of the time. [.]. This means we have a potential cost saving and we are extremely efficient in our way of working. The [Design Thinking] methodology is totally different." (interviewee_1, project_1).
After all projects were analyzed, they were clustered into two groups. As elaborated in the literature review, a team is considered to be highly innovative, if they generate new and creative ideas and are able to implement the outcome. Hence, into this group belongs project no. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14 because the participants explained that they developed radical ideas and implemented the solution later on. An exception is project 7 which is not further implemented at the company today. However, after consultation with the project leader of project 7, I decided to cluster the project as highly innovative because the project leader explained that they are planning to build on the radical innovative ideas later on. Thus, the possibility that they are going to implement the ideas at later stages is present. Interestingly, the category efficiency was only applicable to highly innovative projects.
On the contrary, project no. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 are considered to be less innovative in comparison with the other projects. The incremental ideas are only partially new. The outcome of the project is either not implemented at all or there was no intention to implement it. Project no. 10 and 12 are distinctions because their incremental ideas were implemented. Nevertheless, these projects were considered to be less innovative compared to the radical and implemented ideas of the other group. Table 5 shows the two groups and the corresponding categories [.].
Summarizing the results of the application of Design Thinking and the team's innovativeness, a full theoretical model is developed. Figure 8 shows all categories found in the data and revises the theoretical model of the study. As elaborated above, newness of the method, efficiency and termination emerged as new categories during the data analysis. All remaining categories are confirmed by the data and none of the proposed categories had to be refuted.