3. Core Principles

The popularization of design thinking as a tool for innovation resulted in large global corporations adopting design disciplines into their ways of working, for example, Google, Samsung, and IBM. While all of these might differ in detail, they commonly share these four core principles:

• Always ask questions: The only way to get to answers is to simply ask questions, both to yourself and your colleagues. The more questions they ask, the better the answer can be.
• Focus on people: Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the requirements for project success. It’s not ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them.’ For a design thinker, it has to be ‘us with them.’
• Collaborate: Using the full mental power of the people involved is key. Usually, companies don’t do that because they’re stuck in old structures and linear processes with departments fighting with each other, and large hierarchical systems.
• Build your process around possibility: Design is built on the possibility of the never-seen-before. Design thinking starts with understanding, exploring and materializing a solution or a concept.