Lean Design Thinking
Lean Startup meets Design Thinking: two user-driven innovation strategies compared
The biggest risks of innovation projects are often not technological (“can it be built?”) but concern user acceptance (“does anyone need it?”). User-driven innovation methods such as Design Thinking and Lean Startup respond by involving users early. But they have different ideas about how this should happen, which processes and tools to use, and why.
This project analysed both methods systematically, identified their theoretical foundations, overlaps and differences, and combined them into a theory of iterative, user-driven innovation, Lean Design Thinking. It allows companies, designers and researchers to combine quantitative and qualitative elements of both methods productively.
The resulting paper, Design Thinking vs. Lean Startup: A Comparison of two User-Driven Innovation Strategies (DMI 2012, with Katja Thoring), is my most-cited publication, with 442 citations and 98,000 reads on ResearchGate. The line continued with a process model of Design Thinking based on method engineering (E&PDE 2011) and The Agile Landscape of Design Thinking in the Research Handbook on Design Thinking (Edward Elgar, 2023).