Yes! and come to SMU to learn about it.
Last post was about strategy and differentiation, one of the ways to ensure you are differentiated is to think in a design thinking way.
Design Thinking is a tool for innovation, which uses a consumer-centered approach that puts the discovery of highly detailed consumer needs at the forefront of your innovation process.
In Design Thinking, compared to other design processes the focus is shifted further towards the end user. This is achieved by an empathy exercise: trying to better understand customer needs and behaviours from their own perspective. By engaging in Design Thinking and getting closer to the end customer, you are better able to understand the reasons behind those actions, and in turn prepare for possible future patterns of behaviour if the same reasons remain in play. Design Thinking is also accompanied with a stimulating atmosphere that promotes new ideas and encourages the participation of the entire team.
The Design Thinking process can be split in the following five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. In processes that are human-centric, empathy is essential to understand the problems and needs of the end users, and to model the firm’s strategy. “Define” involves reviewing all the information gathered during the “empathise” stage in order to define the problem that is to be solved, and start setting goals and objectives.
“Prototypes” is necessary once the ideas have been generated. It is essential to start producing cost effective and simple prototypes that generate feedback from potential users or developers.
“Ideate” is encompassed within the operational application of Design Thinking. At this stage, the objective is to think about new ways to solve the problems identified with your business strategy. “Test” is the next phase, in which the purpose is to get feedback from the end users.
Challenges in applying Design Thinking
From experience I believe there are three main challenges when it comes to implementing Design Thinking; leadership, team, and individual. At the leadership level, there is often a lack of resources to carry out the last stages of the Design Thinking process. At the team level, there is often a loss of focus during the process, heavy time constraints, and other specific management issues deflecting the team away from the design process. At the individual level, team leaders were sometimes described as weak facilitators, and there were also some participant issues deflecting attention away from the project.
By improving the user experience, Design Thinking not only has a positive impact on customer relationships, it also adds to the value proposition company, and can lead to a sustainable source of revenue growth.
If Design Thinking is established as a key component of strategy, it helps to position your business model by understanding the underlying customer needs and behaviours. Design Thinking enables firms to build out prototypes, test and learn from them, and finally launch the products and services that will help them succeed.
The strategic support for design teams is their ability to understand the relationship between what they offer and their customers. This comes from their appreciation of the interactions of their target market and the environment the customers inhabit.
Design teams need to appreciate three interconnected strategic areas
- Thinking form a customers perspective is the opportunity DESIRABLE, is there a problem or an opportunity that people want to fix or take advantage of?
- thinking from a technical perspective is the opportunity feasible- can we make it, to the standards our customers want?
- finally, thinking from a commercial perspective is the opportunity viable; can we make this for less than people want to pay, therefore making a profit
Once design teams can take their process and apply it strategically, your organisation will have a great way to engage with an anticipate customer future needs and create well designed products for the future.