Design thinking is a way of looking at different alternatives in order to solve a problem.  It has a process of looking at an issue firsthand and coming up with an alternative solution to solve said issue.  For example, I saw an article about Airbnb that I can compare this strategy to.  When they were first starting up, they were only making about $200 a week that they had to split with 3 people.  They pattern that they noticed was that most if not all of the images about the various properties were poor.  So, they jumped on the plane and went to New York.  They rented a camera and took high quality images of all the rental properties, and they saw their weekly revenues double to about $400 the very next week.  That was the first turning point that they have seen, and they thought that it was scalable, so they applied it to their other areas and boom, everything was on the up and up.  This is just one example of how the design thinking process can be affective.