Disruptive innovation in complex systems
For almost a year, the Design Studio and systems engineering teams at Dassault
Systèmes have shared their respective practice: design thinking and complex systems
engineering. This comparison gave us insights about several shifts: the people
involved in project ecosystems, the call for more disruptive innovation, the growing
capabilities of computers, the need to take into account the full complexity of humans
and a few shared ambitions between both disciplines. After explaining this context,
this paper reports on the comparison between the two practices, through a crossreferenced strength & weakness comparison, and other counterbalancing points. We
also share early hypotheses, gleaned from our experiments, on how to combine the
design thinking and systems engineering approaches in early stages of innovation, at
the right time, despite cultural differences. To conclude, we look at what is needed to
make complexity easier to grasp, how a combined approach also calls for a fresh look
at project organisations and for a practice mixing art and technology.
