What are the best strategies for co-creating with partners using design thinking?

Successful design thinking co-creation with partners requires a structured yet adaptable strategy that promotes imagination, user-centered thinking, and continual development. It's a dynamic process that could result in novel, user-centered solutions.

To co-create successfully with partners using design thinking, prioritize open collaboration and diverse teams. Begin by understanding your partner's perspective and defining clear problem statements. Iterate, prototype, and gather feedback regularly, fostering a growth mindset within your teams. Effective communication and celebrating achievements will drive innovation and fruitful partnerships.

To establish a common ground I often start identifying shared values. Shared values are a solid foundation and help in building trust required for open discussions. Finding common goals is an explorative and iterative process, it works best when each parties feel comfortable to share, are receptive to listen and show genuine curiosity.

Engaging partners and users will help you think out of the box and prevent the risk of using your resources less efficiently. Although we are mainly responsible for building our part, entities should never forget that the puzzle pieces must click with their environment. Otherwise, it will likely sit in a box for a long time.

An important step before running any interviews, observations or surveys is to gain sufficient background information and domain knowledge. That helps in being to interact spontaneously during an interview or knowing what to look for during observations.

Couldn't agree more. An ideation team composed of diverse voices from across the organization can serve as a powerful innovation engine. This isn't just about generating ideas—it's about leveraging collective intelligence to gain a 360-degree view of customer needs. Techniques like brainstorming and prototyping are valuable, but they're turbocharged when backed by a team with a multifaceted understanding of challenges and opportunities. Now if this team could also look outward and gain shared customer insights, that would supercharge their ideation with real world input, and lead to more innovations.

The ideation is the easy part, most people love being creative and come up with lots of ideas. The hard step, which is the most rewarding, is to detail out an idea, make it specific enough so that it can be assessed, compared and prioritized. To make it specific, write clear statements on the benefits and the changes it will bring. At this stage quick sketches, simple figures and visuals are useful triggers to help the team consolidate an idea and gain a shared understanding of what the idea mean.

I'm going to try this with a training client. I expect it will give them a look at the processes and creativity we employ on their behalf and prime the flow of closer collaboration.

Don't wait too long to prototype but start with a simple prototype that can be built in a day. This first prototype often help define key assumptions to be further validated. I have seen teams writing pages long excel files before having built anything. It turned out once finally a first prototypte was built, key assumptions where not yet captured. Other times teams have spent months on a prototype but have not thought about key user assumptions. Build in 1 day and validate for 1 week, rebuild in 1 week and validate for 1 month, etc. Invest more time in testing that building!

Iterating a solution can feel wrong when working in collaboration with a partner. Each wants to offer expertise to the other and the expectation might be that the built solution or prototype has to be right. Make sure to position the first solution as a learning opportunity and agree on specific joint learning goals. If learning happens it will always be a success, even if the solutions turns out not to be the right one yet. With repeated learning loops, eventually either a joint solution will come to life, or both parties will agree they are not a good fit for a long term partnership, which is also a positive outcome saving both time and effort.

Context: I have spent my 35 years career so far in Sports and media tech. As I read this article I immediately was reminded of my experience with a major US sport league with which we organized a one week co-ideation session (in Italy). They brought a team of 12 people from all angles and functions like fan engagement, venue management, content, digital, ticketing, etc... We worked together as a team and generate a huge amounts of ideas. Some were implemented together in the following months but possibly the best memory is when I discovered live during the pinnacle event that one of those ideas was prominently implemented without us even knowing about it in advance. I asked the team to productized that experience and propose it to others.