Design Thinking can be described through several different frameworks. In this article, we will look at IDEO’s approach to Design Thinking — from its well-known Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation framework to the more detailed process IDEO uses to describe Design Thinking today.
What is IDEO?
IDEO is an international design and consulting firm founded in Palo Alto, California, in 1991. The company has locations in Cambridge (Massachusetts), Chicago, London, Munich, New York City, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Tokyo.
Its approach starts with people. Rather than beginning with a technology or a predetermined solution, teams try to understand people’s needs, behaviors and experiences before deciding what should be built.
This human-centered perspective is one of the foundations of IDEO’s approach to innovation.
IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Approach
Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which IDEO calls design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.
ideou.com
IDEO approaches innovation by considering three fundamental questions:
- Desirability: What do people actually need or value?
- Feasibility: What is technically possible?
- Viability: What can work sustainably for the organization?
A strong solution usually needs to balance all three.
A technically impressive product may fail if nobody wants it. A highly desirable idea may fail if it cannot be delivered economically or technically.
Design Thinking helps teams explore these tensions before committing heavily to a solution.
The Classic IDEO Design Thinking Model
One of the best-known descriptions of IDEO’s Design Thinking process organizes the work into three overlapping spaces:
Inspiration → Ideation → Implementation
They are better understood as spaces rather than rigid sequential steps. A team may move backwards, repeat activities or work across several spaces as it learns.
- Inspiration opens the problem or opportunity through observation, research and learning from people.
- Ideation turns observations into insights, possibilities and testable ideas.
- Implementation develops promising ideas into solutions that can be tested, refined and eventually brought into the world.
Inspiration
During Inspiration, the team explores the problem before deciding what the solution should be.
This may involve observing people, conducting interviews, studying how people behave in real situations and looking for needs that are not immediately obvious.
The objective is not simply to collect information.
It is to discover something that changes how the team understands the problem.
Example
Imagine a company believes that customers abandon its online service because the interface contains too many steps.
Instead of immediately redesigning the interface, the team observes customers using it.
They discover that the number of steps is not the primary problem. Customers stop because they are uncertain what will happen after submitting their information.
That insight creates a different design challenge.
Ideation
During Ideation, teams turn research and observations into possible directions.
This usually combines two types of thinking:
Divergence: generating many alternatives.
Convergence: identifying which possibilities are most worth exploring.
Multidisciplinary teams are particularly valuable here because people with different backgrounds tend to frame problems differently and generate different kinds of solutions.
The objective is not to immediately select the safest idea.
It is to expand the solution space before narrowing it.
Example
For the customer problem above, possible ideas might include:
- showing the next steps before submission;
- creating a progress indicator;
- providing an immediate confirmation;
- allowing users to preview the process;
- simplifying the service;
- offering live assistance at the moment of uncertainty.
Only after generating alternatives would the team decide what is worth prototyping.
Implementation
Implementation transforms promising concepts into something that can exist in the real world.
Prototypes allow teams to expose assumptions, technical constraints and unexpected user reactions before investing heavily in a final solution.
Early prototypes do not need to be polished.
A sketch, clickable mock-up, storyboard or manually delivered service may provide enough information to determine whether an idea deserves further investment.
The process continues through testing, iteration and refinement.
Implementation also involves communicating the solution so that other people — customers, colleagues, decision-makers or partners — can understand and adopt it.
IDEO’s Current 7-Phase Design Thinking Process
IDEO’s current Design Thinking resources describe the process in more detail through seven phases:
- Frame the question — clarify the challenge without prematurely deciding on a solution.
- Gather inspiration — learn from people, context and real experiences.
- Synthesize for action — organize research and identify meaningful patterns.
- Generate ideas — explore many possible directions before narrowing them.
- Make ideas tangible — turn concepts into prototypes that people can experience.
- Test to learn — use real interactions to discover what works and what needs to change.
- Share the story — communicate the human need, the learning process and the value of the solution.
This does not mean that the classic Inspiration → Ideation → Implementation framework has become wrong.
The seven phases provide a more detailed view of activities that already happen inside the broader three spaces.
A useful way to think about them is:
Inspiration
→ Frame the question
→ Gather inspiration
→ Synthesize for action
Ideation
→ Generate ideas
→ Make ideas tangible
Implementation
→ Test to learn
→ Share the story
The mapping is not absolute because Design Thinking is iterative, but it shows how the two descriptions relate to each other.
IDEO Design Thinking in Practice
Consider a company trying to reduce customer support requests.
A traditional approach might begin with:
How can we automate more support requests?
A Design Thinking approach would first question the framing itself.
Inspiration
Observe customers trying to solve problems and interview them about where they become confused.
The team discovers that many support requests begin because customers cannot understand the status of an existing request.
Ideation
Generate different ways of reducing that uncertainty:
- clearer status information;
- proactive notifications;
- improved terminology;
- a visual timeline;
- better onboarding;
- an AI assistant.
Implementation
Instead of immediately developing a sophisticated AI system, create a simple prototype of the status timeline.
Test it with customers.
If the number of questions decreases, the team has learned something useful. If it does not, return to the research and reconsider the problem.
This illustrates an important IDEO principle:
Design Thinking is about learning your way toward a solution rather than assuming the solution at the beginning.
IDEO vs Stanford d.school
IDEO and Stanford d.school share many principles, including empathy, experimentation, prototyping and iteration.
The difference is mainly in how the process is organized and communicated.
The familiar Stanford d.school framework uses five modes:
Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test
IDEO’s classic framework uses three broader spaces:
Inspiration → Ideation → Implementation
IDEO’s current process provides a more detailed seven-phase description.
None of these models should be treated as a rigid checklist. They provide different ways of structuring essentially similar human-centered innovation work.
For a deeper comparison, see Design Thinking Models Compared: Stanford vs IDEO vs IBM vs Double Diamond.
Which IDEO Model Should You Use?
If you are introducing Design Thinking to a team for the first time, the classic three-space model is useful because it is easy to remember:
Inspiration → Ideation → Implementation
If you are actually running a project, the seven-phase model provides more guidance because it separates important activities such as framing the question, synthesizing research, prototyping and testing.
You do not need to choose one and reject the other.
Think of the three spaces as the high-level map and the seven phases as a more detailed route through the same territory.
Useful links
IDEO home page: https://designthinking.ideo.com/
At IDEO, you’ll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others. Everything on this site is free for you to use and share with proper attribution.
Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit: https://www.ideo.com/post/design-kit
