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Researchers at the University of Virginia's Darden Business School and the Design Management Institute report on field research into how widely design thinking is being adopted in leading companies and how effectively is it being adapted in a variety of industries.

They interviewed boundary spanners – leaders who operated at the intersection of design and business – in a number of Fortune 100 organizations and focused on ten organizations where design thinking was having an impact on practice.

They found that design thinking was, in fact, also a problem solving process, not just an innovation process.

Examples are anecdotal.

Learning from design tools – such as, ethnographic interviewing, customer journey mapping and job-to-be-done analysis – encouraged team members to stay involved with the problem long enough to reframe the opportunity.

The highest payoff from adopting a design-thinking approach was not necessarily in identifying a solution, but rather in innovating how people worked together to envision and implement the new possibilities they discovered.