Design thinking has long attracted considerable attention from academic researchers. Ever since Herbert Simon (1969) first discussed design, many researchers have attempted to validate the nature of design thinking in the business context (Brown, 2008; Buchanan, 1992; Cross, 1990; Lawson, 2005; Liedtka, 2004; Martin, 1995; Rowe, 1987; Whitney, 2006). Currently, two issues still remain unclear regarding prior work on the topic of design thinking. First, design thinking is often intermingled with the process for how designers work. According to one New York Times article (Rae-Dupree, 2008), for example, design thinking is a combination of field research and the generation of freewheeling ideas. Similarly, in a visionary piece on design in BusinessWeek, Whitney (2006, p. 13) suggested that "design thinking can offer greater, deeper, and faster insights into users' lives to help businesses know what to make in the first place." Brown (2008) also views design thinking as a methodology that covers the full spectrum of innovative activities with a human-centered design ethos. Second, there has been little discussion of how design thinking actually materializes in practice. Instead, a wide variety of business cases are introduced, which in turn focuses on the outcomes of design thinking and largely ignores how these outcomes are created and achieved.
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