DESIGN THINKING CONSULTANTS: HOW TOP EXPERTS CAN HELP DRIVE INNOVATION

Design thinking consultants posit that as the concept permeates everyday business vocabulary, more companies seek outside expertise guiding its methodical implementation for innovation and strategy. Such growing interest has expanded a cottage industry of specialist design thinking consultants hired to train internal teams. But what exactly does this role entail and what value do they provide?

Most evangelize and facilitate a creative, human-centered process for problem solving. Beyond aesthetics, they expand design into how systems and solutions can better serve people’s comprehensive needs. The best design thinking consultant strategies and methodology favor experimentation over established best practices to fuel breakthroughs.

In practice, design thinking consultants first assess organizational readiness for operational and cultural change required to adopt these creative habits. They conduct stakeholder interviews, workshop key teams on mindset shifts and audit processes for friction points. Advisos quantify existing employee skill levels in design competencies like quick prototyping, user empathy and cross-discipline ideation.

Armed with this baseline data, experts create customized training programs to build internal design coaching capacity. Workshops demonstrate how to apply design thinking for innovation, leadership communications, customer research, product development and more. They supply easy-to-implement toolkits for sustaining organizational adoption long-term and tracking progress against maturity benchmarks.

Put simply, top design thinking consultants aim to transform company ecosystems where creativity flows freely across silos to solve real problems. They coach employees how to frame challenges from human perspectives first, asking “why?” before determining solutions. Pros teach how to rapidly visualize ideas for feedback over getting bogged down debating hypotheticals. And they ingrain persistent experimentation knowing failures instruct.

In these ways, design thinking consultants inject outside perspective challenging legacy norms and reopen assumptions constraining innovation. They grant teams new frameworks for translating insights into practical inventions that move metrics. Over time, organizations organically perpetuate these modern creative habits themselves.

While still a maturing field itself, demand for consulting firms keeps growing as change acceleration leaves companies feeling caught off guard. Organizations’ driving purpose remains unlocking latent human potential within teams to positively impact customers and communities.