Design sprints: Innovation accelerator or innovation theatre?

A design sprint is where a small team progresses from selecting a problem to ideating, building, and testing a prototype in five days. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Multi-day workshops, under many names and guises, are nothing new in the design and innovation industry. I recall being asked, as a product manager for Unilever back in 2000, to ‘Hot House’ a problem we had on one of our ice cream brands with a cross-functional team.

Another time, working for Heineken subsidiary DB Breweries in the mid-2000s, our chief marketing officer asked us to take a less elaborate approach to innovation and fast-track some ideas.