Design thinking is being used to address issues ranging from the design of medical devices, packaging materials, electronic equipment, food products, invoice processing systems, tourism services, blood donation services, emergency room visits, and a whole variety of other products and services across the world. Essentially, if you have a customer (and naturally your customer will face problems and challenges), design thinking empowers you to innovate a solution – which serves as the key to business growth.

Design thinking is one critical tool for innovation and business growth. It is intrinsically human-centred, therefore enabling you to zone in on the core problems your target customer faces and devise a solution. It is a strategic process which enables even the most traditional of thinkers to come up with creative solutions to the problems at hand. It has a front end that is strongly focused on idea generation, and a back end that is focused on experimentation and testing. Marrying these two stages enables you in a uniquely powerful way to deal with the challenges that organisations are facing today.

Design Thinking empowers innovation by using ideas akin to individual legos, combining them in different ways while maintaining a focus on the core human need you are trying to address, in order to develop a new and useful idea. The ideas are often simple, but game-changing. Like a pourable ketchup bottle.

In the last 2 years, we have taken a number of our member companies on a Design Thinking journey. Working on their own business projects they have experienced how Design Thinking can give them a process to really help understand their customer needs, be more creative with their possible solutions, and prototype and experiment quickly to as to achieve the best product or service in the end.

On 1st & 2nd of June in Dublin, we bring you an opportunity to experience Design Thinking for yourself. Over these 2 days, IRDG is bringing together global thought-leaders and practitioners from the world of industry, academia and the arts to help you to understand how Design Thinking could add value and be scaled in your organisation. We invite you to take the time to join us.