Design Thinking in the Automotive Industry. Creativity and Innovation

Text sample:
Chapter 5.2. Innovativeness of Design Thinking Teams:
The second part of the interviews focused on the innovativeness of Design Thinking teams. As proposed in section 3.2.1 team's innovativeness is measured with two categories - creativity and implementation. The overview of concepts and categories is given in Table 4. Furthermore, efficiency is added as a new category. Overall, the assumption that the sample might vary in innovativeness is confirmed by the data. Out of 14 projects, 8 are clustered into the highly innovative project group and the remaining 6 are less innovative projects. The clustering procedure is based on the coding procedure and explained in the following [...].
To the category creativity lower order categories namely incremental and radical ideas were added to the template. Incremental idea is explained by the two concepts "the outcome is not surprising but feasible and tendentially new" and "applying an existing solution, technology or idea to a new field" whereas radical idea consists of the concepts "develop something new for the world", "fascinate people within and outside the company" and "the solution is creative rather than obvious". With this differentiation of incremental or radical idea a first evaluation of the innovativeness could be made.
The second category of team's innovativeness - implementation - is coded by the concept "implement parts of the project or the whole prototype". Design Thinking projects often aim to generate a lot of different ideas at the beginning of the project which are clustered or further developed later on. This process leads to more than one solution, outcome or prototype. Hence, a project could be implemented partially and still it is considered as a holistic implementation of the whole project.
"Well, out of 24 ideas we have chosen 4 ideas. There was a very close cooperation with the managing director [...]. It was really important to make sure that the implementation is realized. We

Ellen Simon, Master of Science (M.Sc.), studied "Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship" at the Technical University of Berlin and University of Twente in a Double-Degree Master Program. Before, she graduated as a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in "Informationsorientierter Betriebswirtschaftslehre" at the University of Augsburg. In parallel, the author gained experience in diverse project placements at the German automotive and consulting industry. Thus, she has special knowledge in the area of project management, technology management, innovation management and information technology. At the moment, she works as an International Trainee at an automotive manufacturer. This book is based on her studies and work experience in this industry.