To navigate the complexities of advancing technology and increased competition, we need to become more agile and adopt an innovation culture. Design Thinking drives us to look through the eyes of our customers.

It provides the connection between creativity and innovation. It gives us a solution-based approach to solving problems. Increasingly being adopted by some of the most successful businesses in the world, Design Thinking opens up new ways of approaching complex problems, enabling companies to serve the needs of users today and in the future.

The impact of Design Thinking in business:

• Design-led companies outperformed the S&P index by 219% over 10 years.
• McKinsey studied 300 public companies over 5 years and those that were most skilled at executing design principles achieved 32% more revenue and 52% more total returns to shareholders.
• IBM report showed that teams who used Design Thinking did better user research and thus reduced the product development and testing time by 33%, making savings of up to $1.1M.

A photographer’s studio in Amsterdam was the setting for the very first Design Thinkers Bootcamp in 2011. It was the brainchild of leading Dutch design thinkers Marjo Staring, Arne van Oosterom and Tim Schuurman. One of the coaches was David Kester, former CEO of the UK Design Council and founder of DK&A, our parent company, a strategic design consultancy that helps clients to innovate and improve the services they offer. Over the week-long Bootcamp, the four of them were delighted as 30 business executives from 15 countries became Design Thinkers. Together, they resolved to build a centre of excellence for Design Thinking in Europe. And in 2016, the Design Thinkers Academy London was born.