How Design Thinking De-Risks Innovation

The market doesn’t decide the fate of your innovation — your process does. Design thinking validates solutions against 3 essential criteria to give them the best chance of success.

The perceived risk of innovation 

During times of uncertainty, innovation is often one of the first areas to see budget cuts. 

Why? It’s risky. If a solution stalls or fails in the market, all of that time, energy, and investment go to waste. 

But innovating is essential to remaining competitive — especially in uncertain times. The market will continue to evolve while the risk-averse organization stays stuck. That’s how companies like Blockbuster and Blackberry slip out of relevance (and into articles like this).

Fortunately, innovation doesn’t have to evoke the feeling of flying blind. Certain innovation frameworks can reduce the risk of failure. One of those frameworks, design thinking, de-risks innovation by validating ideas against 3 essential criteria: desirability, feasibility, and viability.

Successful innovations are desirable, feasible, and viable 

Risk isn’t an unavoidable part of innovation. You can reduce the risk of failure by assessing your ideas for 3 critical factors: 

1. Desirability: Do people want the solution? 
2. Feasibility: Can the organization implement the solution? 
3. Viability: Will the solution align with objectives and generate ongoing value?

Innovation falters when any components are missing. If people don’t genuinely need or want the solution, it will likely fail in the market. If it lacks internal buy-in or the necessary resources, it may never advance beyond a prototype. And if it doesn't generate revenue or align with financial goals, it won’t work long-term.

But a solution that balances all 3 components sits in the sweet spot of innovation, where risk is low and potential upside is high. 

Solutions that fail often lack one component 

Feasibility and viability are often somewhat baked into the innovation process. (Teams can only build what they have the technical capabilities, resources, and buy-in for.) 

Desirability is typically the missing piece. Teams get excited about a solution and fail to consider desirability until too much time and resources have been spent, and it’s too late to pivot. 

Desirability should be a guiding principle, not an afterthought. Design thinking helps you balance all 3 components throughout the innovation process.

Design thinking ensures all 3 elements 

Design thinking is a 6-step framework for solving complex problems. It de-risks innovation by emphasizing desirability and providing ample opportunities to test and refine ideas. 

New to design thinking? Read our comprehensive guide.

The iterative nature of design thinking allows teams to validate the desirability, feasibility, and viability of solutions, and pivot faster when needed (so there’s less sunk cost).

Here’s how design thinking covers all 3 pillars of effective innovation.

Ensuring desirability 

Design thinking starts with empathy — performing qualitative market research to understand the perspective of those who will use the solution. Then (and only then), teams define the problem that the solution is meant to solve.

Why this works: 

• It focuses on the problem: Instead of starting with an interesting idea, you start with human needs. This prevents you from getting to the testing stage and realizing you were solving a non-problem or creating something people don’t want.
• It’s driven by the human perspective: Design thinking prioritizes user feedback throughout the entire process. Customer and employee input guides you like a north star, rather than serving as a box to check off at the end (when it’s often too late to make any necessary changes). 
• Iteration enables confidence: The design thinking innovation framework involves testing with diverse groups of users. The purpose of the testing is not to confirm the solution is good, but to learn how it can be improved. This provides the evidence to make decisions with confidence.

Ensuring feasibility  

Even the best ideas aren’t bulletproof. McKinsey research shows that organizational transformation efforts fail about 70% of the time.

Often, teams want to implement a new solution but lack the resources. Any of these can stall or block an innovation from reaching the market:

• The infrastructure or technology isn’t in place to build it.
• Leadership isn’t sold on the new idea.
• The company culture isn’t ready to support the change. (Maybe burnout is rampant, or the solution is up against an “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” philosophy.)

Design thinking helps teams spot these barriers before running into them at the finish line. It pulls in diverse groups of people, including leaders and employees who will be affected by the new solution, to explore ideas from every angle and help make them stronger. By sharing ownership across teams, the new solution feels more meaningful to everyone. 

Organizational readiness is key to a solution’s success. Design thinking can shift the company culture to support innovation — learn how.

Prioritization workshops are another tool for de-risking innovation. These collaborative checkpoints democratize innovation, recruiting outside team members to vote on ideas, prioritize solutions, and help plan implementation.

They help to surface critical internal knowledge and answer questions, like:

• “IT has already been working on that.”
• “We tried that already, and it didn’t work because…”
• “What if we combined those two ideas?”
• “How long will it realistically take us to roll this out?”
• “What do we need in place before we can implement this effectively?”

This company-wide prep work paves the path for effective implementation.

Ensuring viability 

If a solution works for customers and employees but not the business, it won’t be sustainable. 

We often see this in tech: Early funding allows companies to “hook” customers with low fees, but those rates have an expiration date. Scaling too quickly without a sustainable business model can reverse momentum and even change how the brand is perceived. 

It only took a few years for Airbnb’s reputation to slip from “the better alternative to hotels” to “unpredictable lodging experiences at high prices.” 

Design thinking helps organizations avoid this by factoring in viability. It invites leaders into the process early to ensure solutions are aligned with business goals and can be implemented at scale. 

If a solution isn’t viable, you’ll learn that early and be able to pivot with less concern over sunk cost.

Failing “smart” de-risks innovation

Failure isn’t detrimental to innovation — it’s an essential part of the process. The goal is failing small and regularly, so you can succeed on a large scale when it matters. 

By validating desirability, feasibility, and viability early and often, design thinking builds in moments for low-stakes failure that ultimately makes innovation successful. That way, you can invest in solutions with confidence that your efforts will be rewarded.

Want to see exactly how design thinking de-risks innovation? Our consultants train design thinking in context, so your team learns the framework while working through it and building something impactful. 

Train your team to innovate effectively → 

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