Design Thinking and business innovation
Business innovation processes as part of Digital Transformation programs usually affects some of the more well defined and established characteristics of products, services, business models, environments, and anything else designed or developed in the past.
And if you thing a little bit more in detail, not long ago, as humanity we asked ourselves things such as like:
- Is it possible to develop a transportation system faster than a horse
- Humans fly? Could do?
- Doors always have handles?
- Should the water taps always be manual?
- Do phones really need to have a cable?
- Do cars have to have a driver and a steering wheel?
However, as a Business Innovation promoter, you will be eager to help senior management to ask relevant new questions that can help to improve customers and final users daily basis jobs or tasks, while they’re meeting clients’ business needs.
Besides, if you are planning to introduce Design Thinking as part of a Business Innovation program be ready to work alongside with execs using new methods that will help them and their team to understand how to research the human needs of their users and how they (your team of course) can find out the most powerful, creative and innovative solutions to meet final users’ needs creating prototypes and begin testing. All of this, is just a small pieces of a process of business innovation.
Now, facing the current situation, the new frontier of business innovation is to break the assumptions we have about how things should be and find disruptive ways to reach the same goals in ways that we never considered possible before.
Sometimes this completely reinvents the concept that we had predefined to achieve that goal.
“I keep meeting people who jump to solutions and who don’t question assumptions: engineers, entrepreneurs, executives, and yes, product and experience designers. These encounters made me reconsider. I observed students of different practices who acted without thinking, simply doing their tasks as they were presented. Without creativity, without imagination, without questioning. That’s not what Design Thinking is about. As a result, I’ve changed my mind: Design Thinking is really special. “
- Don Norman, Grand Old Man of User Experience, in Rethinking Design Thinking
So what is Design Thinking?
In business innovation Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, question assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.
At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to attend problems. It is a way of thinking and working, as well as a collection of practical methods.
Design Thinking in business innovation revolves around a deep interest in developing an understanding of users for whom we design products, services or solve problems, whether they are end customers or company internal users.
Design Thinking helps us in the questioning process, likewise, it helps us to observe and develop empathy with the target user:
- Questioning the problem
- Questioning the assumptions and implications.
Design Thinking in a business innovation process is extremely helpful in addressing ill-defined or unknown problems, reformulating the problem in a human-centered way, creating lots of ideas in brainstorming sessions, and taking a hands-on approach in prototyping and tests.
Design Thinking also involves continual experimentation: sketching, prototyping, testing and testing concepts and ideas.
Finally, in business innovation it is important to have tools such as Design Thinking to develop better products / services and better align with the pillars of Digital Transformation that focuses on the end user.
