DESIGN THINKING FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION IN ASIA: THE CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

As a human-centered innovation approach, design thinking (DT) has been widely applied in a variety of industries and spheres to create new and enhance existing products, services and processes by organizations around the globe. DT is highly collaborative, involves direct communication/feedback and requires cross-functional/cross-hierarchical participation. DT is also iterative, necessitating embracing risk and ambiguity of the experiment and instead of penalizing ‘failures’, learning promptly from them. Nevertheless, Asian countries are often described as high power distance, high uncertainty avoidance, collectivist cultures in which high context and indirect communication are implied. This conceptual article includes analysis of academic research articles, reports, interviews and books by design thinking experts to analyze advantages of design thinking for business innovations, discuss major cultural characteristics of Asian countries using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and respective challenges in applying design thinking. It concludes by providing practical recommendations, limitations of the analysis and suggesting aspects for future research.

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