You’re starting an innovation project. What are the best design thinking tools to use?

The interesting thing about empathy maps is: Who fills them and with what information? When we fill those out after let's say an interview with a customer, we fill it with the information we think the customer would feel (after careful observation and questioning of course). That means, there is a filter and information might not be understood, might be understood wrongly or just misunderstood. We can ask the customers directly too, or even let them fill out the map, but then we encounter just another problem: social acceptance. They won't honestly say what they actually feel, but rather what they think you want to hear. The solution? Read system 1 vs system 2 Thinking by Daniel Kahnemann ;) Oh - and neuromarketing (Stroop Tasks ftw)

Oftentimes ideation doesn’t produce radically new or innovative ideas. The attempt to ?think outside of the box‘ fails. Why is that? Well, it’s impossible to think outside of the box if you can’t see the box you are in. And that ?box‘ is made off your beliefs and industry conventions, the things most people accept as given. If you’re able to free yourself from conventional thinking you can produce more radical ideas. Techniques like radical reframing and hacking industry conventions can help with that.

Ideation session is great tool , however in my experience I have found that the success of the ideation session depends largely on how effectively it is conducted....the better methodologies and an experienced leader can make the ideation sessions a success.... #ideation #brainstorming

I always love to start a new Ideation session with a new team with a challenge, that also doubles as a fun ice-breaker: "Let's gather ideas why [this obviously bad idea] could be a great idea." So for example: "Why could it be a great idea to mount seats ?? on the wings of a plane and offer those to our customers?" - an absolute idiotic idea of course - but after a while people come up with more and more good reasons why: More cash, faster exit after landing, an adventure for adrenaline-junkies perhaps, or fresh air.. bring your pet-birds free of charge etc. etc... The goal is just to foster out-of-the-box-thinking. After all the ideas are gathered ("Yes, and.."-Mindset rather then "No, because.."), then they are checked for consuequences.

Prototyping is a great tool , and in my opinion must be used , to gather user feedback and refinement , as well as for gauging their interest , or to consider a possible pivot ....

Prototyping is about testing your product before bringing it to market. We prefer to begin even a step further back, using Pretotyping. While a prototype is meant to test the product, a pretotype is used to test the customers opinion on the idea of that product. A pretotype can be something as simple as a scetch on a napkin, a visualization, a mock-up, anything that gives back the honest customer feedback. A good example of this would be Dropbox (75k people on their beta waiting list with a video, before they wrote the first code) or McSpaghetti (McDonald's offered this in their digital menus and then measured whether people order it or not - if people did, they got a message it was sold out). Fastest Feedback, lowest costs!

If you make the customer Journey a central element of your product development, you can use Story Mapping to visualise and orchestrate the product development with it. It's a powerful tool to align different teams and stakeholders and it offers an opportunity to keep the true MVP -thinking alive in your teams. Often times, employees don't even realize the scrutiny our customers have to go through when interacting with our corporate policies, support-lines or bad products. By following our customer step by step you'll get a deeper empathy and understanding of what they feel like along the way.

You can integrate several feedback loops into your agile way of working structure using retrospectives, integrating SIT (system integration tests) and UAT (user acceptance tests) into your DoR (Definition of Done) Coding Guidelines, starting ideation sessions with input from customers via empathy map, developing new products using fast iteration cycles and preto- & prototyping. Integrate customers and different stakeholders into decision making procedures. It's about getting faster through the Build-Meaure-Learn-Loop than your competition.

Innovation can be differentiated into solving problems vs. creating opportunities. Design Thinking is essentially creative problem solving and it can be effective if the problems affects people. However it’s not a innovation technique in the sense that it produces novel opportunities. Progress doesn’t just come from solving current problems, but from imaging what could be, from imagining radical alternatives to the status quo. Design Thinking always needs a problem, a ?how might we‘ statement as a starting point and is therefore limited in its innovation potential. There are more suitable but lesser known approaches for opportunity driven innovation like radical innovation, innovation of meaning or hacking cultural beliefs.

In my experience, in any innovation project, the main thing is the Problem Solving Mindset, Tools are great to use, but tools are the Servants and Mindset is the Master ....