While you may know in your heart that design thinking is right for your organization, you know you still have to sell it to your decision-makers and stakeholders.

Leadership always wants numbers, so to help you make a solid business case, we’ve gathered eight statistics from reputable organizations that prove — over and over again — how design thinking helps. Read on to learn how organizations from major industries have used design thinking to encourage innovation and create meaningful customer value.

Get even more stats, details and examples with our free eBook, Human Centered Design in Action, and learn how design thinking has helped organizations around the world.

1. Design-focused Companies Annually Outperform The S&P Index. An investment tool called The Design Value Index shows companies that integrate design thinking into corporate strategy outpace industry peers by as much as 228 percent.

2. Design thinking companies have higher revenue and better shareholder returns. Data from McKinsey shows how organizations that regularly follow design thinking practices see a third higher revenues and 56 percent higher returns than those that don’t.

3. Design thinking companies get products to market faster and for less money. Forrester found these companies cut initial design and alignment by 75 percent, which delivered cost savings of up to $872,000 and increased profits by roughly $1.1M for major projects.

4. The most successful — and recognizable — brands use design thinking. IBM, Google, Airbnb, PepsiCo and Nike are just a few of the wildly successful brands that consider design thinking a core part of their culture and way of doing business. Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi famously told Harvard Business Review that design had a voice in almost every crucial decision the company made. During her 12 year tenure, sales increased 80 percent.

5. Design doesn’t just improve products, it improves corporate culture. 71 percent of companies say design thinking has improved the working culture at their organizations and 69 percent say it makes their innovation processes more efficient.

6. Design-led companies have formal processes to engage customers. A study by Adobe found 78 percent of companies that prioritize design have a defined process for coming up with new digital customer experience (CX) ideas and 83 percent have formal systems in place to test ideas with customers.

7. Customer focus drives greater customer loyalty and market share. Half of design-led companies surveyed by Adobe say design thinking results in more satisfied and loyal customers and 41 percent report greater market share as an advantage of having advanced design practices.

8. Companies that excel at design thinking didn’t learn it on their own. Half of design led organizations report learning design thinking from coaches, agencies or academic institutions, according to research from Parsons School of Design. Just 20 percent say they learned it on their own through tutorials or self-help literature.

Build progressive buy-in with Spark by ExperiencePoint™, a series of versatile design thinking episodes you can customize to build the right curriculum for your organization’s learning needs.