De-sign thinking or Developing Significance for Targeted Open Innovation Alexander Tsigkas, Evangelia Fasoula
Alexander Tsigkas, Assistant Professor Democritus University of Thrace Faculty of Engineering Department of Production and Management Engineering Vas. Sofias 12, GR – 67100 Xanthi, Greece Email:
[email protected] Tel: +30 25410 79307 Fax: +30 25410 79307 Mob: +30 698088 1342
Evangelia Fasoula New Line Furniture Ltd, Sales and Marketing Manager Ioakim Pantelaki & Kriou, GR – 34100 Chalkis, Greece Email:
[email protected] Mob: +30 697223 3621
Abstract A Knowledge-based economy depends heavily on innovation leverage, although not exclusively. Due to the increasing degree of integration in collaboration and networking, a multiple helix model is used in scholarly research with increasing complexity for analysing such an economy. The use of the helix model is mainly driven by the need of policy makers to enable innovation. However, there is little evidence that this use will also improve the quality as well as a minimisation of effort in pursuing innovation leverage. Instead, it shows that by making the helix model heavier, the complexity of the analysis will be even higher with questionable results in terms of its economic usability. Targeted Open Innovation may be a better approach, but it will need a different way of thinking. De-sign thinking, otherwise known as developing significance, is offered in this paper as a possible method into pursuing high quality innovation within acceptable time frames and resource use. De-sign thinking is a method utilising Heidegger’s phenomenology for accessing the things themselves. Access means disclosing the phenomena that are genuinely covered in a world conceived exclusively as networks of objects, opening up their significance, in this case, within the context of innovation. Moreover, De-sign thinking can also be used as a phenomenological access to science wherever and whenever development of significance further and beyond mere theory is wished. Keywords Helix model, phenomenology, Heidegger, Living Lab, mass customisation, open innovation
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Introduction to the question of design and innovation
The reason why there is a tendency for companies to turn towards the way designers think that they think in order to create value is obvious from their point of view: to be able to innovate quicker and more efficiently than their competitors. Although innovation is important for the viability of an organisation, a fact that has been supported by numerous publications since the early fifties, it is certainly not adequate enough. Weber (2011) has undertaken an extensive literature review on the importance of innovation for organisations. Design thinking as a term is used today increasingly by marketing, even in disputable situations, mainly because its usage sells. It sells, but the question should really be, what does it sell. What it really sells is hope to companies, especially to those that sell services. Through the design of the so-called customer experience it is hoped that the customer will bite into a short-lived sense of pleasant time in living the designed experience. However, in economic terms, companies cannot be purely based on the hope that a pleasant customer journey will also have an economic result. Even if there will be one, there is no evidence that it offers an opportunity for projecting or even estimating results, let alone measuring them in a convincing manner. Marketing needs more convincing support into the effects design thinking might bring. The opinion here is that experience cannot be designed since experience is ontological and not ontic. Design thinking looks at the ontic customer journey as a matter of mere living experience, i.e. dealing with the customer as an object present-at-hand, a term used by Heidegger to denote isolation and thematisation, a kind of standing reserve for the order taker. This attitude suits design thinking. In service design especially, design thinking may provoke boredom for the customer due to her thematisation. For any kind of innovation to bring results the activity cannot be left to luck or hope. It is a chimera to believe that by merely bringing people together in an open fashion in a so-called environment of customer co-creation, that alone is enough and provides a guarantee for results that fit Marketing objectives. Whatever the pros and cons of open innovation might be, the primordial question is how the human being exists and what is its meaning of existence. Innovations are pursued for humans. It is more or less accepted today that Science alone is not enough for innovations; this being the new maxim, at least not enough for radical innovation that is needed. Yet, Science has different objectives beyond pursuing innovations which have immediate commercial leverage. The 2
idea thrown onto the table is to bring more creativity to the party, and in this effort professionals of arts, psychologists, sociologists, economists together with other scientists and professionals in environmental technology should all come together with hope to work out solutions that may fit business objectives. However, there are two interdependent reasons why this hope cannot come true within a predictable time frame and effort: 1.
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Merging ideas from different disciplines in co-creative or simply creative environments is a herculean task. The more the contributors from various disciples, the more complex the task. The result is usually either a compromise of human nature or a compromise because of functional complexity, or both. In most cases, it is a suboptimal solution usually based on cost drivers, something that could be possible without such effort and waste of resources. It is therefore a questionable endeavour. Humans looking for solutions for other humans theorise and by theorising thematise the issue, even if they try to associate it to the praxis of each discipline. This approach tries to resolve the unresolvable issue of looking at the human being as a subject that belongs to the world and simultaneously as an object that constitutes the world.
Therefore, in order for innovation to acquire real meaning and significance in economic, social, environmental, as well as surrounding sustainability terms for the business, it should be targeted and, at the same time, both of the above cited reasons must be eliminated due to their inter-dependability. What is required is a completely different approach that would support individual organisations as well as organisations operating as value adding communities (Tsigkas 2005) in their endeavour to fit innovation into their strategic plans and not vice versa. Targeted Open Innovation (TOI) is a new framework to effecting innovations. It stems from the need of organisations to focus on innovation fitting their strategic plans, and not vice versa (Carayiannis and Campbell 2010). For measuring the Knowledge-based economy, a triple helix model has been introduced (Carayiannis and Rakhmatullin 2014). Furthermore, Leydesdorff (2014) claims that the triple helix indicator could be extended algorithmically, for example, with local-global as a fourth dimension or, more generally, to an N-tuple of helices with a quintuple helix in order to include the environment. Despite envisioning a 20+ helix model, Leydesdorff draws caution to its adoption by researchers. The questionable part of Open Innovation, the open of innovation, has to be placed under the scrutiny of the word target. It seems that for something (a process or anything) to be open and at the same time targeted, which ontologically is similar to closed, does not really make a lot of sense. However, if targeted is something similar to closed (in terms of telos, aim), then Targeted Open Innovation could be interpreted as something that once closed has been disclosed in-order to let the phenomenon appear for-the-sake-of innovation. It is something that withdraws and reappears until it finally appears in its own temporality. In so doing, innovation finds its own place. Open innovation is placeless. It does have a stand. What appears, the phenomenon, is what makes the innovation to be innovation. The path to disclosure of phenomena is the key ingredient of the novel way of thinking coined as De-sign thinking offered in this paper using Heidegger’s method of phenomenology (Heidegger 1996). Heidegger overcomes the subject-object dichotomy (self as a subject of the world as opposed to self as an object of the world) in a radical way: The world does not stand against Dasein, Heidegger’s subject, but it belongs to Dasein. How Dasein exists in the world is not theoretical, nor mental, but depends on how Dasein encounters the world. During encountering the world, Dasein's own possibility of existence opens up in how Dasein connects to the world. According to Heidegger (1996), phenomenology is the discourse of phenomena, i.e. it is the logos of phenomena and not the study of phenomena. It is a systematically directed way of “listening” to concealed phenomena. De-sign thinking has been developed in order to systematically show how the method of phenomenology allows for disclosing the phenomena of any kind of innovation. Further and beyond that, it is recommended as a useful way to access any science, thus offering the opportunity to gain more insight than if a theoretical approach to know-how is advocated. TOI can use De-sign thinking for its targeted 3
innovation openness, but certainly not exclusively. TOI seeks innovations targeted to marketing strategies. Marketing positions value, and in doing so, it challenges the market. An essential characteristic of modern marketing is positioning, which is a sort of challenging. Challenging is also a way of revealing or disclosing useful things. Through challenging positioning, useful things emerge that have form within the market. In Tsigkas (2012a), form addresses the various kinds of references that constitute a useful thing totality within a specific context. References address the way of Dasein encountering the world. When marketing challenges something towards revelation until form is shown, we talk about a topos where knowledge is disclosed. Such a knowledge topos is the essence of modern marketing, but in itself it has nothing to do with marketing. Innovation is a special kind of topos where commercially exploitable knowledge is disclosed. The question is how can modern marketing though TOI help the human being and at the same time not be in opposition to it. A knowledge topos for TOI is where Marketing feels at home. Marketing feeling at home means that Marketing dwells in a market that is well served. Market serviceability is the in-order-to of the useful thing in all n-helix configurations and for each one separately. However, innovation is seamlessly connected to design. The use of the words design and thinking, thinking and design leads to an unforced philosophical relationship to design and vice versa. Philosophy always addresses the essence (αλήθεια) of the matter by asking “what is it”, and design addresses the form (µορφή) (Alexander 1964, p15) by asking “how is it”. Contrary to the opinion of Alexander (1964, p.15), who claims that form is the solution to the problem, while the context is the problem, it is argued here that, because form is the context (Tsigkas 2012a), it is both the problem and the solution to the problem. This is an important statement and claim, because technology, for example, should be viewed as both the problem and the solution to the problem. Therefore, innovation is called to answer the question of what problem it is invited to solve, while being at the same time the problem. As such, technology must break the vicious cycle of being the problem and simultaneously the solution to the problem. This is possible only if the essence of technology is determined, for the essence of technology is to uncover, to bring something to revelation, thus eliminating the vicious cycle. Technology reveals form, which becomes the placeholder of innovation that has a place or a topos in its own right without becoming an object, and in this way, not being in opposition to the human being. By establishing form (Tsigkas 2012b) through technology, innovation finds its topos. Therefore, De-sign thinking must answer the principal question: how, through thinking, topos is de-signed and at the same time how, through De-sign, topos is thought of. In other words, the question is how one might, through unlocking the signs in-order-to develop significance (De-sign) within the form, bring the topos of innovation into its appearance (αλήθεια). Unlocking the signs in-order-to develop significance, and how this is done, leads to the primordial question of what is thinking and how do we achieve this. The structure of this paper is the following. In the second section, the relation between design and innovation is discussed. In the third section, the relation between thinking and innovation is presented. In the fourth section, the issue of De-sign thinking for Targeted Open Innovation from the perspective of Heidegger’s phenomenology is put forward. In the fifth section, a roadmap leading to support the development of a framework for targeted open innovation using De-sign thinking is offered. It relates to Heidegger’s discourse on thinking, in order to create innovation topoi in a business as usual way.
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Design and innovation
There is widespread belief that the general term design has an ambiguous meaning inherent in the term. In many ways it is considered in the broadest sense to mean changing existing situations into preferred ones (Simon 1975, p.55). This is a more general definition that can apply to most cases when confronted with design, either from the engineering or the architectural perspective or even the organisational one. Although from that perspective design is an activity with common roots despite its different meanings, design thinking must be defined in order 4
to establish a common understanding of its essence before using it. In order to facilitate this task, we have decided to look firstly at the two terms that constitute design thinking separately before combining them. In this section, therefore, we will examine the term design from the engineering and architectural perspective in order to reveal the essence of design. What is really a fact today is that the growing complexity of engineering design reduces the distinction between it and design in architecture. The increasing involvement of the human dimension in engineering design brings the two main pillars of design i.e. engineering and architecture so close together that a common ground of understanding starts to develop which can help practitioners and philosophers come to a more integrated understanding of the phenomenon of design. There has been considerable work in bridging the literature on design in engineering and architecture. In Vermaas et al. (2008:3) it is argued that: Despite its diverse manifestations in engineering and architecture all design can increasingly be seen as aimed at the same goal: production of our material environment and the way in which we are designed to live in that environment. One of the most influential designers of the 20th century, Alexander, tried to introduce rationality in design and his diagrams (patterns) became renowned. By stating that the ultimate object of design is form, he accepts the fact that the world is neither regular nor homogeneous. In his famous book Note on the synthesis of form, Alexander writes (Alexander 1964, p.15): If the world were totally regular and homogeneous, there would be no forces, and no forms. Everything would be amorphous. But an irregular world tries to compensate for its own irregularities by fitting itself to them and thereby takes on form. Bejan’s theory of contructals is similar to that of Alexander (Bejan & Merkx 2007). This situation can be paralleled to organisations that expose themselves to the flows of the market that are increasingly personalized as many of one (see mass customisation). Indeed, Alexander lived and worked at a time when mass production was at its peak, where time and motion studies backed god-divined productivity and, as a result, design targets were mainly directed into fulfilling cost targets with respect to quantity. Away from mass production and its stride for homogeneity and central planning, marketing uses differentiation through innovation as a competitive advantage. In conjunction with the widespread belief that continuous or discontinuous or even radical innovation is the key for sustainable profitability, organisations are pushed (by being pulled) to re-think the way of managing and conducting operations. In this world of differentiation, as opposed to being alike, conventional theories on developing and managing the environment of continuous or discontinuous innovation have reached their limits. This is happening because of the difference in the basics of management theories and approaches. Economies of scale are under pressure to give up room to economies of scope and further to economies of one (Tsigkas 2013). In such a world of extreme differentiation, organisations need to re-define the context and re-think, therefore, redesign the way they are formed in order to exploit the irregularities that show up in a differentiated world. The new challenge of Marketing is to dis-close and to un-cover such irregularities for creating new opportunities for innovation. The new challenge for organisations is to find ways of re-adapting their operating and management structure in a sustainable fashion to such irregularities. The new challenge for science is to support radical differentiation and personalisation rather than homogeneity. Science, in general, is known to strive for discovering laws with general validity. Science's main objective is to explain, through experiments or theory, behaviours of various phenomena. Scientists have been drilled and educated to conduct research their whole life. The world of innovation though is a different world. Here, what is needed is a science that will augment and expand this way of thinking. In the past, design also fell victim to science when design was viewed or treated as a science (Science of Design or Design as a Science). Although useful aspects may be gained through treating design as a science by conducting research on design and design methodologies, what is needed for responding to calls for innovation and all its flavours is to treat science as design, and therefore move from scientific thinking to design thinking.
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3
Thinking and innovation
According to Heidegger (2007), questioning is the belief of thinking. Questioning, claims Heidegger, is building on a path. This path is the path of thinking. Heidegger (1960) in Discourse on Thinking wisely distinguishes between two types of thinking: calculative thinking and meditative thinking. Science does not think in the way thinkers think, claims Heidegger (1954). The term technology includes the term τέχνη (technology), which in the philosophy of the Greeks means knowledge. Science is systematically organized knowledge, which is basically a result of calculative thinking. Calculative thinking, though, does not ask for the meaning of the technology it produces. Organisations compete mainly using calculative thinking, the way science does. Technology is based mainly on this type of thinking, which is certainly indispensable, but it remains true that this is a special kind of thinking. Heidegger (1954) in his Discourse on Thinking says about calculative thinking: Its peculiarity consists in the fact that whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. Thus we can count on definite results. This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates. Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning, which reigns in everything that is. Further in the same script Heidegger claims: Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a onetrack course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all. This is a completely different way than the one-track, often one-sided way of calculative thinking. It is clearly not a process. Heidegger calls for a different way of behaving towards technology. He calls for a simultaneous yes and no to technology, because as he mentions: Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed, if we let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things, which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. He calls this comportment toward technology which expresses yes and at the same time no by an old word releasement toward things. He claims further that by having this comportment things are no longer viewed only in a technical way, but the production and use of machines demands of us another relation to things that it is not a meaningless relation. As an example, he mentions correctly for his time, that farming and agriculture have turned into a motorised food industry. Furthermore, he claims that the meaning of technology hides itself. But if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. The one, which shows itself and at the same time withdraws, is the essential trait of what Heidegger calls the mystery. Heidegger calls the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology openness to the mystery. Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together, he adds. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way and he suggests that they promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperilled by it. According to Heidegger, releasement toward things and openness to the mystery give us a vision of a new autochthony, a new topos we would say, which someday might even be fit to recapture the old and now rapidly disappearing autochthony, especially in today’s mobile society, in a changed form. Considering technology as the problem and at the same time the solution to the problem is 6
precisely the right attitude for approaching this kind of thinking that Heidegger calls meditative; for a yes and no to technology and simultaneously open to the mystery that technology carries within itself. It is the path to arrive at innovations that support societies to develop and advance instead of going against them. Science must expand itself to account for this kind of thinking in order to re-form and radicalise scientific knowledge. We started with the question on thinking and we arrived at the point that one could discuss the consequence that Heidegger’s philosophy might have on the ability of an organisation to innovate. We argue that if releasement toward things and openness to the mystery are awoken within the organisation, then these organisations should arrive at a path that will lead them to a new ground and foundation of experience, in this case, of thinking experience. On that ground, creativity will produce lasting works and will sink new roots that will constitute a new topos for the organisation. This new knowledge topos is the new autochthony for the innovating entity necessary for reaching a new level of innovation. Meditative thinking opens up the mystery of innovation, while calculative thinking is only there to account for the economic result of innovation. A new approach to open innovation is born with the term open referring mainly to the way of thinking and not to whether this innovation comes outside the strict boundaries of the organisation, at least not as propagated by the two main initiators of the term, Eric von Hippel (2005), and Henry Chesborough (2003). This new attitude of approaching innovation is coined here as openness to innovation, declaring a different comportment and way of thinking towards innovation. Open to innovation is, we claim, a prerequisite for targeted open innovation. Calculative thinking follows and subordinates itself to meditative thinking. If only calculative thinking prevails, then the consequence is that in the discourse of the competition organisations will be driven slowly but steadily into the turmoil of losing their topos. Without meaning, calculative thinking is easy to drift away from thinking. One-track calculative thinking leads to thoughtlessness, a state in which the organisation might lose its autochthony, its topos. Therefore, knowledge topos for an organisation is its capability for meditative thinking. This is important for organisations, because innovation will come from meditative thinking primarily, and not from calculative thinking alone. Considering the above, there is strong evidence that meditative thinking and innovation are tightly joined. Based on that fact, we argue that innovation is the result of thinking, in particular meditative thinking. Especially in the so-called creative industries, learning to think is an absolute necessity. Heidegger (1954) begins with the following: In what is named thinking we arrive, when we think ourselves. In order that such an effort succeeds, we must be willing to learn to think. (In das, was Denken heißt, gelangen wir, wenn wir seIber denken. Damit ein solcher Versuch gluckt, müssen wir bereit sein, das Denken zu lernen). In the next section, we will support the claim that design is De-sign (Tsigkas, Ha) and furthermore, de-sign is Heideggerian thinking in that it reveals the craft of what is most thought provoking. Openness to innovation is the way to De-sign based mainly on meditative thinking (Besinnung).
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De-sign thinking for Targeted Open Innovation
Using the n-helix model for analysing the Knowledge-based Economy, one accepts that there is one already out there that is different from the political economy. However, political economy and knowledge economy are not alternatives, rather knowledge creation comes as the main driver of an economy that cannot escape from serving the citizen. What there might be is a displacement in the interest and a hope placed on knowledge disclosure (not production) that will strengthen the main pillars of political economy. Whatever the name of the new economy is, what is needed is not more mere collaboration and integration at the level of stakeholders, but first to question the way knowledge is created. Scholarly research concentrates on empirical studies trying to obtain more insight through modelling of reality, instead of going to the reality itself. In so doing, they lose contact with the main 7
driver of the study, which is knowledge creation. Knowledge itself is then arbitrarily left to the co-operation partners on the n-helix model. Innovation in the future will come mainly through a different way of thinking at all levels of society, from everybody not confined to the n-helix model. Knowledge, as mentioned above, is neither produced nor created, rather it is disclosed, discovered for the sake of something. In order to discover knowledge, we need to go to the things themselves, instead of letting them come to us in a theoretical, mental way through the construction of models of calculative thinking. Phenomenology offers the way to go to the things themselves and interrogate them. Let us now return to the introductory statement on thinking and the principal question: how, through thinking, a knowledge topos is disclosed and at the same time, how, through De-sign, a knowledge topos is thought of. This question can now be answered through a phenomenological way of investigation called openness to the mystery of things that characterizes all those who are open to innovation. Fig. 1 illustrates what is meant by openness to the mystery of things (Tsigkas 2014a). By approaching a ball-point pen with the lens of a camera, the mystery hidden in a thing appears. It appears as something that has nothing to do with the actual object of the ball pen. This is a visible example, a way of stimulating openness to the mystery of things.
Fig. 1 Openness to the mystery of things
The question is how one might, through unlocking the signs, develop significance and bring the thing to its appearance (αλήθεια). In the above example, through the openness to mystery hidden in the ball pen a kind of topos appeared, while at the same time looking through the visible signs that appeared one may think how this topos has been unlocked. Unlocking the signs though would never have happened if the thinker would not have taken simultaneously a remote and yet close up position to the thing, if she would have not released her-self into it. Releasement and openness to the mystery of the thing belong together. Positioning to the thing means challenging the thing in order to reveal itself, to open up its mystery, to reveal its topos of being there. There is useful insight to be gained using meditative thinking. This may happen within the world, as well as within an organisation for business as usual innovation. Similarly it happens when marketing positions the organisation into the market. Marketing challenges the market through positioning into it. Challenging is a way of revealing. Through challenging, something emerges that has form within the space of the market, and when that happens the organisation knowledge topos opens up to the world. Although topos is the essence of modern marketing, itself has nothing to do with marketing. In this way, open innovation turns into an open to innovation comportment on an individual basis. There is no obligation or precondition for co-creation, as it is widely defined today in the existing scholarly and practitioner literature. For anyone is capable of innovating (Tsigkas 2014b) and anyone can be open to innovation. Based on this fact, mass customisation for example, can be re-viewed as a result of open to innovation thinking. Through mass innovation, technology can be re-thought and radicalised. A co-creation environment, which involves the user in the creative activity entangled in a calculative thinking environment, is substituted by a real open and free from passivity or activity of the subject non-willing comportment to innovation De-sign thinking topos. Such
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freedom is a pre-condition for reaching real releasement and openness to the mystery of things. With an open to innovation society, targeted open innovation is almost a by-product of the innovation movement. We are now able to support the claim that design thinking is thinking for de-sign. It is learning to think meditatively in the Heideggerian sense. Meditative thinking is a different type of thinking; it is reflection on the appearance and disappearance of the thing. The human being De-signs, thinks, she is a thinker only when meditating between the appearance and disappearance of the thing, the essence of the thing. It falls in the middle it falls in, in order to design to give sense (Sinn), both existence and meaning to the thing. She listens to the call of the thing that calls to be de-signed, to be thought-of, to be sensed. Therefore, to de-sign means to think meditatively, to meditate for its appearance in-the-world. The flow of reflections on De-sign (thinking), the waves of sound calling up, call for releasement for fulfilling towards the thing which calls for acquiring existence and meaning. The free flow of acquisition is obstructed by the irregularities of thought that drifts away due to calculative thinking. Free flow must be facilitated, not by reforming or reshaping, but through transposing and reposing so that “sounds” become louder, thought is attracted and flows through the path towards its origin, towards appearance. In releasement, by letting go of willing, one opens oneself in waiting to be-ing in order to reach equilibrium. In Heidegger’s words: In waiting we are open to be-ing itself and in being open to it, be-ing itself is let be and we are let-in to releasement (Gelassenheit). However, scholarly research on design thinking is heading in a completely different direction. For example, at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI), research on the issue of design thinking looks at synthesizing ideas and goals by the team that is co-creating, with the intention of finding something new, something ground breaking, and an innovation that sells (Plattner et al. 2012). In this research, design thinking is approached from the fundamental calculative thought based on a hunter-gathering pattern that looks at solving a certain problem. It distributes roles for hunters and gatherers as a sort of key experts and at the same time co-creation is performed through a limited number of potential customers. When the idea appears, it follows the normal and usual way of planning and execution. Ideas, although possibly many, do not all break through to the surface, depriving the organisation of thinking and learning to think and therefore of reaching the state of becoming open to innovation. The main difference lies in the way design thinking research is concentrated on innovation through co-creation based on the so-called user experience that is directed towards living experience. The underlined philosophy of user living experience is based on observation of the user by external agents (Brown 2009) and not the provocative thought of the individual, independently of whether he or she is a user or not. Innovation in this case is closed, solicited by the users.
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A road-map to De-sign thinking for Targeted Open Innovation
The question now arisen is how to facilitate De-sign thinking. Quite clearly, the way to De-sign thinking is to follow a path (µέθ-οδος) towards meditative thinking as approached in this paper. The method should include the following steps: (1) Learn to think through dialogues for reaching releasement towards the things (2) Learn De-sign thinking for openness to the mystery of things and encountering the world (3) Build a living lab for practising Targeted Open Innovation (4) Education and training on Heidegger’s phenomenology and basic phenomena (5) Start a pilot project with five representative members (a natural scientist, a scholar, an engineer, an artist and an expert coach on Heideggerian phenomenology)
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(6) Extend the pilot project to various types of organisations (7) Disseminate the method developed for Targeted Open Innovation
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Conclusions and recommendations
In this paper, a method is proposed for enacting De-sign thinking for targeted open innovation. The objective is that design thinking should be approached and methodically pursued as “de-sign thinking” as a way of thinking experience, contrary to most celebrated customer living experience nowadays. There is no evidence that the use of a multiple helix model will improve the quality, time frame and resource usage of innovation. Instead, it is shown that making the helix model heavier, the complexity of the analysis will be even higher with questionable results in terms of its usability. Targeted Open Innovation may be a better approach, but it will need a different way of thinking. Developing significance (De-sign thinking) is offered in this paper as a possible method into directing high quality innovation within acceptable time frames and use of resources. De-sign thinking is a method for accessing the things themselves, using Heidegger’s phenomenology. Access means disclosing the phenomena that are genuinely covered in a world conceived exclusively as networks of objects, opening up their significance within the context of innovation. De-sign thinking can also be used as a phenomenological access to science wherever and whenever development of significance of knowledge is required.
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