Design Thinking: Experimental Evidence of Ideation Strategies That Support Team Innovation

Organizations and universities use Design Thinking (DT) to facilitate team innovation. However, few empirical DT studies have quantified it. Across two experiments, each based on semester-long DT projects to generate innovative solutions to sustainability problems, several different DT strategies were compared. Experiment 1 ( n = 145) compared team performance using a DT-Baseline process to a DT-Expanded process. Results showed that teams in DT-Expanded condition using resource constraint and “Yes and” prompts generated 64% more ideas overall than the DT-Baseline condition, but not more original ideas. Experiment 2 ( n = 140) found that teams using the DT-Reverse Ideas strategy (adding a lateral thinking prompt) generated similar numbers of ideas overall, however, these teams generated 2x more original ideas than the DT-Expanded teams. This is one of the first large-scale, semester-long DT experiments measuring performance and suggests that small DT adjustments have potentially large effects on innovation.