Rethinking Design Thinking: Why Japan Needs a More Radical Approach to Innovation

CLIENT: Hitotsubasi ICS | WORKSHOP/EVENT: Design Thinking+ | Tokyo, 23.04.2025

Rethinking Design Thinking: Why Japan Needs a More Radical Approach to Innovation

On Wednesday, 23.4.2025, I had the honor of being invited as a guest lecturer at Hitotsubashi ICS in Tokyo by Prof. Yoshinori Fujikawa, who led the Berlin School of Creative Leadership’s Executive MBA program in Japan, where I studied in 2018. Hitotsubashi ICS is the academic partner of the Berlin School and one of Japan’s most prestigious institutions for business and social sciences.

As an entrepreneur, I have always been driven by innovation. I built businesses not just to survive, but to invent and reimagine. But after years in fast-moving industries, I realized that I needed to strengthen my strategic and leadership skills if I wanted to take my ventures—and myself—to the next level. That led me to pursue an Executive MBA at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. What I found there was more than business acumen. I found a calling: Design Thinking.

Design Thinking brought together everything I had always intuitively believed in—empathy, experimentation, cross-disciplinary collaboration. It offered a structured way to innovate humanely and at scale. But as I dove deeper into the method, both in practice and academic research, I began to see its limitations. While it is powerful for incremental improvements, it too often falls short when the goal is breakthrough innovation. That realization became the focus of my master’s thesis, and later, of my professional work.

What I uncovered were three main blind spots in the traditional Design Thinking model:

Cognitive Biases: Teams often fall into mental traps—anchoring, confirmation bs, groupthink—that narrow their thinking, even while trying to “think outside the box.”
Cultural Barriers: Especially in international or cross-cultural settings, deep-rooted norms around hierarchy, risk, and harmony can stifle the radical ideas that transformative innovation requires.
Missing Abductive Reasoning: Classic Design Thinking emphasizes divergent and convergent thinking but rarely teaches abductive reasoning—the logic of invention. This is the leap that drives non-obvious, truly original ideas.

In response to these gaps, I developed an expanded methodology I call Design Thinking+. It builds on the foundation of traditional Design Thinking but explicitly incorporates bias mitigation techniques, intercultural competence, and abductive reasoning as core elements of the process. The goal is not just to make better products or services—but to unlock ingenuity and lead teams toward what I call the algorithm of breakthrough.

This approach is particularly relevant for Japan.

Japan is a global leader in incremental innovation—the art of refining, perfecting, and optimizing. The country’s world-class standards in manufacturing, engineering, and service have not emerged overnight. They are the result of centuries of disciplined improvement, passed down through generations. This is deeply embedded in the cultural philosophy of shu-ha-ri—the progression from learning through imitation (shu), to adaptation (ha), and finally, to innovation and mastery (ri). This cycle reflects Japan’s strength in disciplined craftsmanship and steady evolution.

This cultural logic also aligns with the broader concept of Do—the ‘way’ or lifelong practice found in fields like judo, shodo, and sado. The Japanese tendency to adopt external methods like Design Thinking and absorb them into their own practices is part of this deep-rooted respect for structure, mastery, and process.

These approaches have served Japan well. But in the era of digital transformation—and now with the acceleration of AI—there is no longer time for decades of gradual improvement. Today, breakthroughs must be invented now, not tomorrow. The pace of global competition requires not only perfection but bold reinvention.

Why? One core reason lies in its cultural context. Japanese organizational life is deeply rooted in consensus-building, multi-stakeholder alignment, and respect for hierarchy. While these values create cohesion and reduce conflict, they can also act as brakes on radical change.

Breakthrough innovation, by its nature, is disruptive. It challenges the status quo, threatens existing interests, and often begins as an idea that does not yet make rational sense to all. In such an environment, waiting for total alignment or broad consensus can suffocate the fragile beginnings of real innovation.

This is where Design Thinking+ becomes powerful. By training teams to recognize and navigate cultural barriers, manage cognitive biases, and make space for abductive leaps, we create a pathway for breakthrough innovation—even in environments that are naturally cautious.

Gallery – Impressions from Hitotsubashi ICS Lecture-Workshop Design Thinking+

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Innovation is not just about ideas.

It is about how we lead the process of inventing together. And that, ultimately, is what Design Thinking+ is about.

During my lecture and workshop at Hitotsubashi ICS, we began exploring this mindset shift in two parts.

The first part of the lecture was titled “Leonardo: Design as the Power to Innovate”. We examined Leonardo da Vinci as the archetype of the design thinker and traced the history of Design Thinking—its philosophical and linguistic origins, its development through movements like the Bauhaus, and the difference between academic and business applications of design. We also looked at how cognitive biases can subtly but powerfully prevent true breakthrough innovation.

The second part was a hands-on workshop, in which the students were guided through a full Design Thinking intervention. They experienced firsthand just how powerful Design Thinking can be when applied in the right way—and how easily cognitive traps can remain hidden if teams are not trained to recognize them.

The response from the students and faculty was thoughtful, open, and deeply engaged. It confirmed my belief: there is a growing desire in Japan to go beyond what Design Thinking has traditionally offered.

THANK YOU!

Thank you to Prof. Yoshinori Fujikawa for the kind invitation, to Angelina for organizing everything so smoothly, and to the students of Hitotsubashi ICS for their thoughtful participation and energy.