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In today's global marketplace, companies are being asked to create innovative products and services for increasingly diverse users, cultures and environments. These 'design challenges' can be so wickedly complex that the task of aligning all of a project's stakeholders sometimes seems impossible. But it's not. The authors show that design empathy is an approach that can be embraced to draw upon people's real-world experiences and address modern challenges. They provide four strategies for scaling and sustaining design empathy within your organization, including 'telling stories, documentary-style' and 'taking clients on visceral journeys'.

Design thinking has received a great deal of attention as increasing numbers of organizations succeed in solving complex problems by creative means. In doing so, many of these firms have focused on implementing specific 'design methods' - from observational research to iterative prototyping to storytelling-alongside more mainstream approaches. But as any professional designer will attest, design thinking entails much more than applying such methods: to create value, methods must be applied together with design sensibilities. The author explains what design sensibilities are and describes innovations from Altoids to Virgin America that embody the optimal balancing of design methods with design sensibilities.

Radical innovation requires both evidence and intuition: evidence to become informed, and intuition to inspire us in imagining and creating new and better possibilities. Research can be an immensely positive force in the innovation journey, says the author (from leading design firm IDEO), but to derive value from it, we must be willing to complement, challenge, and evolve many of the approaches and practices that traditionally prevail. She shows that design research demands commitment from innovators to reach new levels of understanding about what matters to the people they want to connect with. Three types of design research are defined - generative, evaluative and predictive - as well as how they can lead to business innovation.