Design thinking mindset: a user-centred approach toward innovation in the Welsh creative industries

Published in:
Suhaimi, S. N., Walters, A., & Ward, J. (2024). ‘Design thinking mindset: a user-centred approach toward innovation in the Welsh creative industries.’ International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/21650349.2024.2383410

“This study offers a way forward in cultivating innovation practices in the creative industries, where the bottom-up approach of empowering individuals is suggested as a suitable method to increase the innovation capacities in an industry highly driven by creative SMEs.”

Abstract

The Design Thinking (DT) mindset, a fundamental aspect of User-Centred Design (UCD), is often presented as a powerful and accessible trigger for innovation. There is much discussion in the extant literature on the communication of the DT concept to non-design practitioners to encourage broader use of design-led innovation.

The present study expands this discussion by exploring which DT mindset attributes are considered meaningful for non-design professionals in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It presents a UCD intervention that embeds the DT mindset attributes to introduce design-led innovation to SMEs of the Welsh creative industries.

Semi-structured interviews, non-participatory observation, and reflective open-ended questioning are utilised to analyse the impact of the intervention in supporting creative industry practitioners’ understanding of the DT mindset and design-led innovation approaches.

Our findings demonstrate that the intervention has prompted participants to:

1. challenge the idea of ‘ideas,’
2. frame failure as an option,
3. learn to trust the process,
4. acquire innovation self-efficacy,
5. view collaboration = learning, and
6. change their perception of innovation.

We discuss how these identified ‘mindset shifts’ are valuable toward building individual innovation capacities in non-design industries.

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