Innovate with Design Thinking

Do not bury your head in sand and wish for solutions.

Chat GPT is the talk of the town. Everyone thinks that it is going to take over the world and solve a lot of our problems. We have had VR, AI & AI technologies trying to become numero uno in the past couple of years and the now a new contender has emerged.

The headline has two words “Innovate” and “Design Thinking”. The impact these two words have had over businesses in the past years is proven and documented. Organizations have reduced costs, improved sales & margins, bettered customer experience.

I argue that with these proven credentials, organizations should invest in innovation and use Design Thinking as a medium to identify, build and launch innovations.

Steps To Innovate :

• Identify area of Innovation:

The 1st step for an organization is to identify the kind of innovation that they need.

The Innovation Matrix comes handy here :

This tool allows you to understand what kind of innovation is best suited for innovation at your organization.

1. Radical Innovation:?are innovations which change the business landscape. eg. Tesla cars, Netflix, laptops, Oyo etc.
2. Disruptive Innovation : are innovations that create a new industry / market. eg. Drones, SpaceX , Uber , Airbnb etc.
3. Incremental Innovation : are series of small improvements over a period of time made on products/services. eg. Additional features in your mobile, updates to software, Gillete shaving razors etc.
4. Architectural Innovation: is taking the technology, skills and applying them to a different market. eg. Smart watch used cell phone technology repackaged into a watch.?

• Launch Design Thinking Projects

Once the organization identifies the kind of innovation they wish to persue, design thinking projects are to be initiated

Design Thinking is an iterative process that involves the customer at all stages to find a solution to a problem.

It is a powerful tool as it involves the customer at all stages and also tests the prototypes and refines basis inputs from the customer.

?Steps involved in Design Thinking?

The process starts with

EMPATHIZE (Understand the problem from the point of view of the customer)

DEFINE (The problem is defined after the Empathize stage)

IDEATE (At this stage maximum ideas are generated without any bias)

PROTOTYPE (Prototype of the selected idea is created and run past the customer for feedback and suggestion)

TEST (The final product/service is tested and soft launched)

As design thinking is an iterative process the process is flexible and allows the team to go back to the previous stage if there is a change in assumptions made or any new information is received.

The world already has a proven model to innovate and build customer approved products and services. Do you not think that we should be doing more of this instead of hoping for new technologies to solve our problems.