Design Thinking at Scale: A Multi Team Design Thinking Approach

Design Thinking has become an important and widely accepted innovation approach in many companies worldwide. However, it is mostly used in small innovation or research projects, or is outsourced to innovation labs or design agencies. Furthermore, there is little published data on how to leverage Design Thinking for complex applications. Multiple, collaborating development teams are required to construct sophisticated software products for different stakeholder groups. Therefore, similarly to scaled agile development, several Design Thinking teams should be employed in complex software projects to take advantage of parallel work capabilities and to investigate needs and demands of several customers, user and stakeholder groups. However, currently no approaches to scale Design Thinking to multiple teams exist. With this chapter, we aim to tackle this challenge and present a scaled Design Thinking approach, in which multiple teams conceive ideas in a Design Thinking phase and implement the resulting ideas in follow-up projects ultimately converging into one project and product. This approach is validated in an educational context with a master-level seminar and in the resulting follow-up projects in and outside of the curriculum. We discuss our experiences from the case study as well as the benefits and challenges of our approach. With this study we provide first insights on how to scale Design Thinking to multiple teams and how to leverage its capabilities for complex software products.