What design thinkers initially brought to the field of product development is “Iteration”. Rather than seeing new product development as a linear process of ideation, manufacturing and finally marketing and sales, it brought in the idea that it is better to test raw ideas quickly through experimentation and prototyping, and to only perfect ideas once the basics are right.

While creativity and innovation can come from processes that are not as rigorous or methodical as design thinking, and often involve serendipity and pure luck, design thinking offers a way to reproduce this process in more deliberate ways. The process of design thinking is sensitive to recombining new knowledge, with existing knowledge. As such it is sometimes important to replicate ideas that have already been tested in one domain and apply them to other domains. This is the reason why design thinking teams are often multidisciplinary.

Design thinking has introduced the notion that “Imitation” is the enemy of “Innovation”. If you want to innovate, innovators must take everything that is already known and then stay away from this as much as possible. Breaking the rules and imagine new unprecedented futures is why the design thinking is called design “thinking”: it is only through intellectual processes that novelties are conceived.