Empathizing in design thinking processes for multi-stakeholder innovation

Initiating open innovation for wicked problems is rather difficult because of the number of people/stakeholders that areinvolved and the interconnectedness with other problems. This development presents interesting challenges andopportunities for the development of products, systems, and related services. Design thinking has been widely recognisedas an open problem-solving process with a more human-centred approach to wicked problems than traditional designchallenges. To get a better understanding of these problems, collective action strategies are often required to involvemulti-stakeholders with often conflicting beliefs and values. The empathising activities in the design thinking process aretherefore required for better understanding of the stakeholders as well as the end users.Through analysing interviews with designers and reflecting with practitioners who apply design thinking to supportopen innovation projects, this paper evaluates how VanBerlo, a design and innovation agency in the Netherlands,supports the creation of professional empathy in the early stages of multi-stakeholder innovation. This paper examineshow different empathies were (not) created in real-life design thinking cases by VanBerlo. The obtained insights will beused to enhance the empathy concept and provide hands-on experiences to practitioners when initiating multi-stakeholderinnovation