Innovation comes along with uncertainty, there's no clear script to follow. It's a black box out in the future that needs to be defined, envisioned, analyzed, synthesized, iterated, tested and finally launched. You need the appropriate mindset to embrace uncertainty in the midst of the work and to avoid overly simplifying the creative process, which is crucial to every innovation process, in order to stay within the comfort zone. Because the function of design is to create for the future, designers are used to starting from scratch by connecting disparate dots, embracing the vagueness of information and managing ambiguity. Of course, the process of innovating is not a individual endeavor, but a collaborative team effort.

At the d.school, a "hub for innovators at Stanford", students and faculty from diverse fields (engineering, medicine, business, law, the humanities, sciences, education) use a methodology for innovation that combines creative and analytical approaches. Human values are at the heart of the collaborative approach, which has been called design thinking. Design Thinking draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, along with tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world.

The d.school "bootcamp bootleg" suggests the following mindset for innovators:

• show, don't tell - be visual, create experience and tell great stories
• focus on human values - develop empathy for the people you design for and get feedback
• embrace experimentation - build prototypes to think and learn, to take your idea to the next level
• craft clarity - create a coherent vision out of messy problems framed to inspire and to fuel ideation
• bias towards action - it is about make + do over think + meet
• be mindful of process - know where you are, what method to use and why it makes sense
• radical collaboration - bring together people with various backgrounds and viewpoints

It is important for design professionals to avoid building design silos while their business and engineering counterparts are slowly starting to tear their silos down. Designers with open minds are great team players in the game of innovation and moreover, their creative and inspiring mindset can be contagious!

Our world is changing at high speed: everything is interconnected and complex. It is a human need to keep thinks simple and understandable. This counts for new products and services just as for the collaborative innovation process itself. As the process is not following a stage gate or waterfall structure and has no clear script or check list to follow, the design skills of structuring, visualizing and sharing complex information are a high value for the entire group.

design thinking: not exactly a stage gated approach

Interviews with design thinkers and design thinking coaches of a multinational software corporation, identified 'presentation and documentation' as a crystallized painpoint. 'A lot of ideas get lost', 'shareholders only see the decided upon direction', 'the process is not transparent', 'it's hard to follow up if there has been a break in the process', 'we have no idea if a similar project has happened and what the outcome was', 'it's hard to coach or be involved in the process and at the same time put together a presentation for stakeholders or other groups','post-its with visuals don't digitize well' were some common responses.

A designer participating in the process can wrap up the most important outcomes of a phase or workshop day in a visual way allowing the group to easily continue or connect to what has been discovered so far - even if there has been one of those 'inevitable breaks' (which are hard to avoid working in a multidisciplinary team). Mindmaps, storyboards or graphic recordings are great tools to document an overview, to make connections between visible dots, to simplify without loosing important content. It's not important to keep every single post-it of a workshop week - they are just tools for thought, but roll out a storyboard and sum up the learnings, insights and ideas in a few minutes and your team and your stakeholders will be well prepared for the next step.