Design thinking leads to a higher success rate in innovation

His father was a techie who invented multiple things at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (Natlab). At least, that’s how Rex Bierlaagh remembers it from his youth. Father and son still talk about it regularly. In retrospect, they’re always surprised at how few inventions from the Natlab have actually reached the market.

“For Philips, that success rate was apparently good enough,” says Bierlaagh. “But when I look back with my father at the 70s and 80s, he says, ‘What if we’d had a method that was even faster, more effective, cheaper and more in line with customer requirements so that we could have put more successful products on the market with less money? Surely that would have been wonderful.’”