摘要：{Abstract } To organizations stay competitive, it’s important offer innovative solutions to the market, meeting the consumer’s needs. To create innovations aligned with the business strategies, processes are required to coordinate the activities of different departments of the company, in other words, is necessary to develop an innovation process in the organization. Over last decade the design thinking has been used to promote innovation in the organizations, so, the question is if the design thinking can help to create innovation in the organizations, and if it can generate all the types of innovation. Thus, the objective of this study is to characterize design thinking as a model of innovation. The research is theoretical and conceptual, through a review of the literature of innovation and analysis of publications with empirical evidence of design thinking. The analysis of empirical data showed that design thinking is indicated to open innovation, and is able to generate radical innovations, semi radical innovations and incremental innovations, and can be used to develop different types of innovation (product, service, process, organizational and marketing). Based in the essential requirements of an innovation process and the main features of a model of innovation, the research concluded that the design thinking could be characterized as a model of innovation.
关键词：; chaveInovação; Processos de inovação; Modelos de inovação; Design thinking; Innovations; Innovation processes; Innovation models; Design thinking
