Design Thinking Applied Training Workshop

Land EPA asked ourselves: how do we implement the Innovation part of COSIA’s refreshed 5 Year Strategy? Most of us are trained as scientists and are familiar with the scientific method, whereas Design Thinking uses creative tools to address a broad array of challenges and focuses teams to assess the impacts on end users and stakeholders. The goal of this workshop and following working sessions is to develop a foundation and common language around Design Thinking and explore how Design Thinking could be used to improve the development of Innovation Opportunities (Gaps) to form Challenge Statements, and to create alignment and help SC & WG members flesh out how to progress the Land EPA Key Focus Innovation Gap #22.

Scientific Process meets Design Methods – Core Concepts: (1) Science and Design share optimistic, curious and creative mindsets, integral to exploratory and experimental methodologies. With commercial value creation ambitions, validated ideas can be brought to market and scaled; (2) the Scientific Process can be aligned with Design methodologies to illustrate common exploratory practices. Science has a bias towards falsifying hypothesis, while Design has a bias towards validating ideas. Both benefit from objective testing and iteration; (3) innovation intentions can be mapped to three horizons: Core, Adjacent and Transformational, to help set exploratory ambitions and iterative tolerances. For incumbents, it can be challenging to consider Adjacent and Transformational opportunities while vested in Core operations and goals; (4) efforts to achieve value creating change are largely aligned with determining problems worth solving. Data, insights and a strong sense of opportunity support and foster generation of compelling new ideas and hypothesis; (5) the three lenses of innovation (Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility) serve as macro criteria in determining likelihood of success and long term venture Sustainability. This human centric model emphasizes the need to establish modified or adopted human behaviours at scale.