Driving Desired Futures: Turning Design Thinking into Real Innovation

Headed by the slogan “Design Thinking,” a debate has unfolded over the last ten years about design methods, which goes far beyond the specialist boundaries of design disciplines. Executives and business owners today recognize the potential for economic innovation lying in the creative and analytical mindset of designers. The extensive literature available on “Design Thinking” focuses on the methodology of the design process, while the conditions necessary to spark innovation processes in the first place, have long remained more or less unnoticed. Driving Desired Futures starts here and asks how established innovations arise from a simple idea. What criteria are mostly likely to be the basis from which the ideas of an individual can take hold in a social system? What are conditions, under which they can become incorporated into a diverse group of people? What topics induce managers to choose and then to invest in a specific idea? Questions such as these are pursued in international contributions by renowned experts, using the first digital camera as a case study. They identify the individual and social processes associated with the exchange and implementation of new ideas.