Innovators are not necessarily well-known for their patience with risk managers. Creating something new and worrying about risk at the same time seem antithetical. Many take the same approach to strategic decision making with sometimes disastrous results.

Design thinking – whether in products, services or in decision-making – should have risk built in from the beginning

While there is a time and place for blue-sky thinking, Yolanda Barreros Gutiérrez believes that design thinking – whether in products, services or in decision-making – should have risk built in from the beginning.

As she says in her recent article on the subject, “The bedrock of strategic innovation is the actual decision-making process that must adequately and systematically permit executives to harness risks – without which strategic innovation is simply not possible.”

Read Strategic innovation: harnessing the power of risk.