Since it is mainly human-centred, focused on people’s needs or in other words constrained by desirability, it praises and identifies Empathy as an imperative (Allio, 2014; Blizzard et al., 2015; Brown, 2009; Cross, 2011; Kolko, 2015; Matheson et al. 2013).As Brown (2008, p.3) puts it, “by taking a people first approach, design thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs”.Hence, the effort should not be only to recognise what people claim they need, but also what they never dreamed they wanted in order to create solutions that, when offered, people recognise as something they wanted all the time (Cross, 2011).Empathising may lead to a reconsideration of present beliefs, conventions and values. Empathy feeds the need to understand why things are, which is the foundation of creative work (Allio, 2014).The need to understand people’s latent needs requires more than just asking “what do you need?”. It requires the ability to ask the right questions as well as the power of observation to uncover what’s not explicit. Design Thinking requires focus on user’s emotional experiences and therefore organizations should empower their employees to observe people’s behaviour and draw conclusions (Allio, 2014; Blizzard et al., 2015; Brown, 2009; Kolko, 2015). Since research practise that ignores context is vulnerable to misunderstanding and misrepresentation (Beckman & Barry, 2007), and that inadequate market research is a key factor of failure of innovations (Liem & Sanders, 2011), this pushes the researcher out of the office “to understand the difference between the way things are supposed to work and how they actually work” (Boyer et al., 2011, p.35).Empathy or empathising should therefore be considered the first step of the Design Thinking strategy (see FIG. 2). More than looking for the right way to address a problem, one should try to understand what’s the real problem at hand and frame it correctly (Brown, 2009).During the process, the work is done going through phases of expansion or input gathering driven by intuition, and phases of contraction or categorization, which are more analytical. To minimize the risk, a balance of intuition and analysis is imperative (Boyer et al., 2011).