What is Innovative Design Thinking?

IDT is many things to many people...

The term of "innovative design thinking" or simply "design thinking" means different things to different people. The Innovative Design Thinking (IDT) approach developed by Stephen Lu is a structured thinking framework that supports design decision-making systematically from abstract demands to detail artifacts in order to achieve breakthrough innovations.

• The IDT goal is to attain breakthrough innovation that occurs when the old meaning of a product/service is being radically redefined in customers’ minds, making existing market competitions largely irrelevant 
• The IDT process is derived from theories of design that prescribe a decision-making structure from upstream “what” to downstream “how” with fundamental design axioms 
• The IDT reasoning is based on rigorous thinking steps that use two different propositional logics to generate, compare and select, and improve innovative ideas

There exist many proposals and approaches of design thinking in academia and industry from both business and engineering communities, most of which lack

• Clear definitions of what is innovation and what types of innovation that the approach is targeting 
• Explicit references to the vast amount of proven knowledge and results from prior research in design and decision making 
• Theoretical foundations that can provide rigorous reasoning methods with specific "how-to" steps based on the power of logics 

The IDT presented here is different because it

• Targets at breakthrough innovation with a clear definition 
• Is based on established design theories and methodologies 
• Has a logic foundation that is theoretically sound and rigorous