Axel Schultze
2 min readApr 13, 2021

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I actually agree with the Harvard Business Review, from Sep 2018, "Design Thinking is fundamentally conservative and preserves the status quo".

It may have been successful in its original concept to help build a better user interface for software designer. But it completely failed in the innovation space. There is no known case where Design Thinking helped unfold a groundbreaking innovation. We used it in the past as a vehicle to organize ideas but it was never a strategic tool.

In order to build a tool that helps drive innovation processes, we need to agree on two facts:

1) Ideas come from the brain and they are not random but based o past experiences (see neuroscience).

2) An idea in itself is of no value but creates value with its distribution into a market.

Design thinking does neither explain how ideas get created - nor does it mention the fact tat the idea needs to be brought to market.

After four years of research to better understand how innovation is created we took the duality of ideation and execution as a central understanding and developed a methodology and thereafter a technology to handle that duality. To prove its inner workings we create the equation G = I E ². Meaning a groundbreaking innovation (G) needs brilliant ideation (I) with an outcome of 1 and exponential growth through relentless execution (E²). If the idea is zero or the execution shows growth of less than exponential there is no innovation.

The consequential thinking must be gravitating around those dual interdependent factors. Which has been the base for the Deep Innovation Design methodology. And it became the foundation of BlueCallom.

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Axel Schultze

CEO BlueCallom, Chair World Innovations Forum. Working on the bleeding edge of Fusing AI with Neuro Science. Building the world's most advanced Innovation SW.