Design becomes the backbone of most the organizations when it comes to product development and incremental innovation [1]. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Company quoted that design is not just what it looks like and it feels like. Design is how it works. Design thinking is a simple problem solving approach that combines all the significant elements of the problems, revolves around imagination, and discovering the new solution. Basically, design thinking can be defined as an analytic and creative process that engages a person in opportunities to experiment, create and prototype models, gather feedback, and redesign [2]. Matthews and Wrigley [3], agreed that design has continuously contributing to successful business performance at all levels as well as operational levels. 

In recent years there has been a lot of emphasis on how design thinking able to share innovations. There are many interpretations and definitions about design thinking all around. According to Buchanan [4], design thinking is about people’s efforts to make the products that serve us in our everyday lives. It is a solution-oriented method to create solutions for a complex problem and find desirable solutions for clients. The founder of Apple Company, Steve Job quoted “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like, but design is how it works. Thus, Apple’s objective is to create computers simple to use and make people to fall in love with their products. In order to sustain, Apple should continue to innovate and expand to newer segments. It is very important to highly involve in thinking critically to solve wicked problems. Martin [5] believes that design thinking uses the abductive thinking of designers, to find actively on new data, challenges accepted explanations, and infer possible new world.   

NEC Corporation is a group of company strives to bring integration on technology and expertise to form the ICT-enabled society in the future. [6]. Social Value Design is an NEC original concept to develop innovation solutions by balancing human and social perspective. Design Thinking and Human Centered Design are a combination of NEC’s Social Value Design to build and form new values for customers and society. It is a way to design whereby user perspective is involved in all steps of the design process in Human Centered Design. In business processes, the concept of applying design techniques came from Design Thinking in to create new market, developing new business models, and planning new services with the aim of "creating something new” to market.

In other words, it is a process of creating new ideas or methods by designers for reforming business and society. Successfully, NEC is promoting skills and knowledge on how to generate ideas, ways and methods for practice of projects and workshops in collaboration with universities and engineer-designers [7]. Design becomes central to innovation to maintain or grow market share, increase satisfaction and effectiveness that the designers have something important to offer to the market [8]. Hatchuel  also agreed with Kimbell that design is essential for value creation and innovation that can contribute to management and organization theory. Through Social Value Design, NEC able to deliver innovative solutions for the existing    problems   and   develop  balanced solution ideas from the people’s view and society. Besides, NEC also progressively develop innovative solution through extending their collaboration with stakeholders in society.

Design thinking’s ability to solve complex and wicked problems and its human-centered focus can give startups the customer understanding that is critical for their success [4]. Matthews and Wrigley [3] discussed that Human-Centered Design is mainly focusing on customers and their needs rather than on specific technology conditions. There are many examples have proven that design thinking can steer business growth in the right direction to understand customer’s needs in the market especially in our local markets. For instance, taxi hiring used to be a cumbersome job these days. As we need to wait hours before we reach the destination on time. Therefore, Uber entered the market with its aggregator service by focusing on human-centered design principles. The company has developed a visualization of a taxi’s approach and overcome many customers grievance with its ride hailing application. This application able to eliminate the risk of fake dodgers by creating a cashless payment drive and give power to customers to choose the rate and drivers. Thus, Uber has changed the traditional model business to customer-based business to make customer as a decision maker. Some of methodology is needed to develop better software to ensure the process of creating that software is not ad hoc in nature. 

Design thinking is just the way to find the best ideas and ultimate solutions through innovation approach. By using design thinking, there are several examples of organizations who have changed the way they work and process. One of the companies would be Airbnb where this company about to lose their business and how design thinking helped the company change their future and make profit globally. The Airbnb Company encourages new employees to ship new features on their first day at the company [9]. The designers were assigned to reevaluate the “star” function. Martin [5] also argues that design thinking produces something of value to managers to think analytically and change the way organization process. Airbnb founder realizes that poor quality of photos uploaded by the hosts has tarnished consumers perception towards their service. Airbnb believes that helping hosts produce better photos of their properties would boost business [10-12].

In this paper discussed, how most of the organizations are taking innovation as a principal source of competitive advantage and differentiation. Design thinking generates many potential innovative solutions to a problem in a short period of time. Many leaders believe that design thinking leads a person to a greater opportunity to explore through experiment, develop prototype models and gather feedback which potentially create better solutions. However, it requires a human-centered, creative, iterative, and practical approach to identify the best ideas and ultimate solutions. Generally, the understanding of the ultimate value of design thinking needs to articulate the practices with subtlety, clarity and in much more details and clarification than has been achieved. The designers and researchers could bring a greater innovation where those key contributions to a professional world much needed.

1. Elizabeth, M., Mersha, A., et al. "Visualizing design-driven innovation." The 12th International CINet Conference. Retrieved from http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/12185/.

2. Shute, V., Razzouk, R. "What is design thinking and why is it important?" Review of Educational Research, vol. 82, no. 3, 2012, pp. 330–348.

3. Matthews, J., Wrigley, C. "Design and design thinking in business and management higher education." She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, vol. 10, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–23.

4. Buchanan, R. "Wicked problems in design thinking." Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 5–20.

5. Martin, R. The design of business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2009.

6. NEC. "Social value design." 2017. Retrieved from https://www.nec.com/en/global/design/svd/policy/index.html.

7. Hirose, T., Masahiro, N., et al. "Design thinking to create innovations." Social Value Design Special Issue, vol. 4, no. 3, 2014, pp. 10–15.

8. Kimbell, L. "Rethinking design thinking." Design and Culture, vol. 3, no. 3, 2011, pp. 285–306.

9. Gebbia, J. "How design thinking transformed Airbnb from a failing startup to a billion-dollar enterprise." Fast Company, 2009. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com.

10. Dorst, K. "The core of 'design thinking' and its application." Design Studies, vol. 32, no. 6, 2011, pp. 521–532.

11. Dunne, D., et al. "Design thinking and how it will change management." Rotman Magazine, vol. 28, no. 1, 2006, pp. 8–9.

12. Fox, D., Sillito, J., et al. "Agile methods and user-centered design: How these two methodologies are being successfully integrated in industry." Agile Conference Proceedings, vol. 16, no. 8, 2008, pp. 63–72.