Organization's Effectiveness in Design Thinking and Innovation

Organization's Effectiveness in Design Thinking and Innovation Author’s Name Institutional Affiliation Table of Contents TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u Introduction PAGEREF _Toc20135114 \h 3Pacific Gas and Electric Company PAGEREF _Toc20135115 \h 3Design Thinking PAGEREF _Toc20135116 \h 4Five Elements of Design Thinking and its Impact on Organizational Effectiveness PAGEREF _Toc20135117 \h 4PG&E Excellence in Design Thinking PAGEREF _Toc20135118 \h 5Needs of Improvement in PG&E PAGEREF _Toc20135119 \h 5Recommendations PAGEREF _Toc20135120 \h 6Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc20135121 \h 6References PAGEREF _Toc20135122 \h 8 Organization's Effectiveness in Design Thinking and Innovation Introduction Organizations critically focus on design thinking and innovation to explore more opportunities and desired outcomes in favor of customers. As per the Liedtka (2015), the contemporary approach of emerging innovation in business practices transform the engineering process to the designing process and change their focus from product to customer. This strategy performs effectively in the modern era to create value for customers and minimizes risks for the newly developed product. Furthermore, design thinking and innovation magnificently enhance engagement with customers by going through the linear plan to learn, examine and refine the overall strategy. In another article by Liedtka (2018), it evaluates that managers utilize a design-thinking approach to adjust and try new behavior of customers. Therefore, design thinking and innovation extraordinarily affect organizational responsiveness towards the identification of customer’s need and organizational productivity to attain its goals. In this manner, the paper highlights the influence of design thinking and innovation on Pacific Gas and Electric Company to determine its effectiveness. Further, the paper evaluates the area of improvement and related recommendations for PG&E. Pacific Gas and Electric Company PG&E is one of the biggest firms in the US, which delivers energy and natural gas supply to approximately 16 million residents in California. The company employees about 24,000 American people. Leaders in PG&E significantly concentrate on the design thinking approach to train new employees and gain productive outcomes. They inspire employees with the blend of traditional practices, workshops and simulations for being customer-centric and innovative (PGE Corp, 2018). Therefore, design thinking and innovation has crucial importance in PG&E. Design Thinking Design thinking is the most admirable business process that supports the firm to understand the complexity of the market by utilizing an appropriate innovation in the business strategy (Jordan & Lande, 2016). Thus, design thinking organizes the complete plan systematically to minimize errors in the working process. Five Elements of Design Thinking and its Impact on Organizational Effectiveness The identification of market complexity and user’s needs, the design thinking depends on the five elements that involve empathizing, define, ideate, prototype and test. Consequently, the respective linear approach is remarkable to attain effective results. According to the research of Wrigley and Straker (2017), it determines that in empathize, the leader uses his personal experience and intuition to understand the customer’s need, whereas in define stage; a leader formulates effective teams to provide the creative solutions about the identified problem. In respective phase, leader prefers to create diverse teams because they create strong impact on the innovation due to their excessive connections, multiple alternatives ideas and creativity. By considering the third element; ideate refers to the generation of influential ideas that are outside the box and provide unique solutions to resolve the defined problem. The techniques utilize for ideation is brainstorming, scamper and worst possible ideas to identify the most substantial idea. All three elements are progressive to determine the problem and relative solution for a business. In the fourth stage of design thinking, prototyping occurs, which is tested within the team or within the small group outside the team. An inexpensive process creates a simulated product with similar features to gain a response from consumer side. It can be...