Facilitating Innovation Through Design Thinking and Prospective Ergonomics

"Need-Seekers" companies who engage with costumers and end users often respond to non-expressed needs and are the first to market new products and services. Recent advances suggest design thinking and prospective ergonomics promote creativity and innovation. Design thinking approach implies empathy as an innovation mind-set to understand the latent needs of people observed in real settings and prospective ergonomics aims to anticipate future needs, habits and behaviours. In this paper we aim to 1) discuss the benefits and limitations of "design thinking" approach in the field of management of innovative projects 2) propose a dual approach combining the principles of "design thinking" and those of prospective ergonomics to anticipate needs, uses and future behaviours and 3) develop an evaluation method of the efficiency and efficacy of this dual approach. This combined approach aims to foster radical innovations by not just satisfying actual users needs but by creating new needs.