Meet Consumer Needs With Design Thinking
Design was once largely about making products more attractive. Today, it’s a way of thinking, a mind-set, a creative process, a set of capabilities and skills that spans entire organisations, driven by the desire to better understand and meet consumer needs.
Design Thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses empathy, ideation, prototyping and experimentation. But it’s more than a methodology. It’s a mind set and a culture that can be embraced to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for customers.
T. J. Watson Jr., IBM famously said – “Good design is good business”. Research demonstrates that for every €1 invested in design, businesses achieve as much as €20 in increased revenues.
IRDG has been championing design thinking as an approach to support business innovation for many years, and has a number of established activities in this area.


“Taking an online or in person training won’t make you a design thinker. It more or less gives you the metaphorical membership card. What’s needed is a daily commitment to changing one’s behaviour to be more human centred. This means shifting one experience, one interaction, one conversation, or one behaviour every day to adopt a design thinking mindset. Over time, being more human centred in all we do becomes the norm and our teams and organisations begin to take notice. This is how change happens…one conversation, one interaction, one experience at a time.”
Holly O’Driscoll, Founder/CEO Ampersand Innovation
Design Thinking Videos

Design Thinking Ireland
Design Thinking Ireland aims to inspire and provide a unique immersive learning experience for those across industry who seek to fuel creativity, up their competitive advantage, and create more meaningful products and experiences for their customers.
Leaders of innovation, particularly C-Suite and Functional Leads, along with those responsible for the delivery of new products, processes and services for business growth will benefit from this experience. Teams that excel at customer centred innovation are highly collaborative and multidisciplinary, comprised of people from different backgrounds, including design, engineering, research, marketing, HR and business, so a mix of disciplines is welcome.
IRDG has been hosting Design Thinking Ireland every year since 2014, bringing together a diverse mix of Irish and international speakers from industry, academia and the world of design.
Watch the 2019 video here.
Visit www.designthinkingireland.ie
“Service Design is a discipline that focuses on the design and implementation of successful services. In essence, it is applied Design Thinking in the specific context of service innovation. It has user-centricity as a core value. Qualitative user research, working with personas and user journeys as well as prototyping and iterations are common practices in the discipline. Whereas Design Thinking is often used in the context of creating new product ideas itself, Service Design goes beyond that.”
Manuel Grobmann, Co-Founder, Fuxblau


IRDG Design Thinking Shared Interest Group
Design Thinking Shared Interest Group (SIG) sessions are specifically for industry members who are keen to learn more about the application of design thinking in their business and seeking to benefit from the collective experience of other industry leaders.
The Shared Interest Group (SIG) brings together a diverse group of c. 20-40 people from across industry to collaborate and share experiences.
Various IRDG member companies host the SIG throughout the year and the agenda is devised to comprise of sharing from the host, teaching or instruction of a useful design thinking technique, and problems or challenges that any participant would like to put forward for group discussion.