If you're looking for the secret to business success, some suggest you should start by forgetting everything you know.
Approaching problems without preconceived ideas of solutions is one aspect of "design thinking," a term that refers to applying design principles to business.
"It's about the way designers look at opportunities and problems," says Heather Fraser, business design professor and director of DesignWorks, the centre for design-based innovation and education at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.
"They approach things more holistically, with more intuition and more of a human dimension. They're willing to take risks and be more exploratory. This is inherent to the way designers work - engineers, industrial designers, architects, graphic designers. It's about the act of creating something new and original."
And creating new and original things is precisely what can make businesses successful.
If you're leading a company that's growing, you're probably using design thinking on some level whether you know it or not, she adds.
But there are ways to be more aware of design thinking in business, and the first is simply to allow yourself to experiment more.
"If you think of the past 50 years, the MBA has very much been about analytical problem solving," says Paddy Harrington, creative director at Bruce Mau Designs. "And that education becomes more about maintaining and protecting what's there, as opposed to venturing out."
Letting go of analytics isn't always easy. But putting the emphasis on intuition is key to design thinking. "If you trust your intuition, you can think through things faster and more effectively," Prof. Fraser says.
That willingness to explore the unknown is perhaps the most consistent quality among designers, regardless of discipline.
"If you ask people what they want, they can only tell you what they know," says Luigi Ferrara, an architect and designer who is director of both Toronto's George Brown College School of Design and the Institute Without Boundaries, a Toronto-based studio that works toward collaborative design action. "But design thinking actually imagines what people might want and concretizes it."
He gives the example of residential lofts in Toronto. "Before someone created a loft space, everyone wanted eight-foot ceilings. But when this other option was introduced, people gravitated to it. The power of design thinking is introducing these new paradigms."
Instead of approaching the design of a product - or a customer-service experience, or a workflow or any other aspect of business - with the idea of improving something that already exists, put the original idea aside for a moment and start with a clean slate.
Imagining the possibilities is one thing. But how does that translate into doing?
To make the idea more tangible - and see results - you have to apply the design thinking concept to the entire business model, Prof. Fraser says, rather than to ideas in isolation.
Mr. Ferrara agrees, saying that design thinking reaches its potential only when it applies to every part of a business. Products, store layouts, websites, marketing campaigns - even offices and workflows all benefit from design.
"You need to look at a design strategy that cuts across all the touch points of your business," he says. A restaurant, for example, should think about the food itself, how customers order that food, what the eating experience in the restaurant is like - and that's just to start
The effect of a cohesive design translates into a top-notch customer experience, Prof. Fraser says, pointing to the iconic example of design thinking: Apple.
"In their case, Apple doesn't actually have a lot of patents. They have a great brand and parts that come from other manufacturers. But they put them all together in a beautifully designed product that's part of a whole eco-system. It's all integrated. You need to think about your business model like a rain forest that is so intrinsically connected, you can't pull parts out of it."
Does all this mean that entrepreneurs should be shelling out cash to professional designers? Not necessarily. "People are inherently creative," Prof. Fraser says.
"The best entrepreneurs do this instinctively," Mr. Ferrara agrees.
Tapping into design thinking may simply mean looking at your business and thinking about your customer and their experience. "You can do that just by coming up with lots of ideas and saying, 'I'm just going to let go and explore,' " she says. "And if you do that, you will find that you will question your business model and ask, is this the only way this can be done?"
If you do team up with a design agency, do it early in the process, Mr. Ferrara says.
"The biggest mistake I see is people work everything out and then go to a designer afterwards and ask them to design," Mr. Ferrara says. "But the best ideas come from imagining the possibilities. Otherwise, you'll just get more of the same."
"Look at Blockbuster," Mr. Ferrara adds. "They realized they had to switch to DVD. But did they switch to distribution by Internet? No. And what happened? Netflix emerged. Blockbuster was not looking at designing a new experience. But Netflix was," he says, referring to the Internet-based company that invites customers to order DVDs by mail or stream them onto their computers.
Perhaps the biggest advantage design thinking can give a company is a competitive edge, Mr. Ferrara says. "Companies are facing competition from people around the world who are designing to a higher standard. If Canadian companies don't start to use design, they will get squeezed out of the global marketplace."
Canadian design at its best
Umbra: The Canadian duo who started this home decor design business in 1979 has grown their company to more than 200 employees, with products sold in 75 countries. "These two guys identified a gap in the market and addressed it with design thinking," Mr. Ferrera says. "At first they started making garbage cans to fill that gap, and then curtain rods, and it just grew from there."
Loblaws: "Don Watt was not just a business story," says Mr. Ferrara, referring to the man who revitalized the grocery store chain by overhauling its store-brand retailing . "He was a design story, too."
Four Seasons: The chain has become synonymous with hotel luxury. "They kept trying different ways of delivering personalized luxury," Prof. Fraser says. "And they ended up at a model that is quite different, which is hotel management, not ownership."
Indigo: "Heather Riesman is a natural design thinker," Prof. Fraser says. Ms. Riesman changed the face of the book industry in Canada when she merged the sale of items such as wrapping paper and home decor accessories with books.