Constantly moving towards innovation is a well-known approach to reach sustainable competitive advantage, especially for global companies. However, in order to achieve success, innovation must provide perceived value for the stakeholders. On the last two decades, a new proposal of how to improve perceived value has received the label of product-service system (PSS). Its development has been based on the combination of the traditional product and service development processes, achieving some relevant process models in literature that describe how a PSS could be developed. However, many enterprises have been trying to shift their core from offering products to offer PSS, what requires not only a shift in the business model, but also in the culture. The PSS development process models need to lead the companies towards a creative and user-centered approach. One possible approach that may be combined to the PSS development process is called design thinking (DT). It is a fashionable user-centric approach already used by many leader enterprises to support innovation. The DT procedure basically employs design methods and reasoning patterns in order to solve problems. However, this approach theory was underdeveloped by academy, requiring more than the huge amount of work that approach only practical aspects of it. Besides, there is no agreement among authors of how and in what moments DT could be combined to the development process, ranging from statements that DT should replace the first research cycles of the front-end of innovation (FEI) until authors that believe that the DT approaches the conceptual design phase. The main objective of this work is to explore the application of DT in the PSS development process, what shall be done by first characterizing the fundamental elements of the DT approach and comparing them to the elements in FEI and PSS development process models. The methodology framework of this research is adapted from the design research methodology (DRM), combining well-known methods such as case research, content analysis, among other proper methods that provide support to achieve the proposed goals. Up to this point, only partial results have been achieved. The fundamental elements that characterize the DT approach were identified, reaching 59 tasks that describe the basic steps of a DT process. Some empirical studies were also performed, whose results supported the understanding of how DT may be applied in the PSS development. A first schematic of how the DT fundamental elements will be compared to the development process models elements was developed, linking them by one of the element categories. Future work shall provide a comparison of what DT fundamental elements were already prescribed in the PSS development model, showing what DT elements effectively represent the novelty of this approach and in what moments, i.e., phases or activities of each model, the complete DT process may support PSS development shall be identified.