What is Innovation?

Innovation is difficult to define precisely but for most people it involves “thinking outside the box” and “trying something different” in order to make things better.  We might be enhancing a process, a tool, a system or an environment but the bottom line is that we’re not content with the status quo and want to make things better.  And so we innovate.

How can we Design for Innovation?

It turns out that there are things we can do to enhance innovation. Over the past fifty years, a process known as Design Thinking has emerged as the dominant framework for ensuring that innovative solutions actually work for real human beings. It puts users at the centre of the process and uses “rapid prototyping and testing” to better understand constraints and evolve towards a promising solution.