Make your brand-new year more entrepreneurial

What sums up a year for you? As a bustling 2024 comes to a close, we are sure that you have both on your mind - the adventures you had in 2024 and what you are looking forward to in 2025. And yet, there would even be a third list of opportunities that cropped up during the course of the year but didn't get the time and attention they deserved.

The fact is that for professionals, makers, creators, business owners and forward-thinking corporations, the list of what one wants to build, create and transform is never complete. This spurs and inspires one to new ventures and adventures, and the cycle of creation begins again.

Yet for many, this could be a year of lost opportunities, missed chances and late moves. Sometimes owing to circumstance, alternative priorities and in many cases owing to inertia (being warm and comfortable doing the usual), organizations do not invent the new or innovate enough, thereby lagging behind.

But the idea is not to regret lost opportunities of the past year. The better and more productive thing is to make capital of new opportunities in the coming times. A brand-new year gives you and your team a fantastic opportunity to make up for lost times and get cracking on some cool new innovations and experiences.

There are ways in which you could speed this up.

Here are three ways, your organization can unlock innovation & business-creativity faster

The list on our unfinished agenda is always far from over. Be it with a new business opportunity, a prototype to build out, leveraging newer tech like AI, sustainability initiatives, a social innovation opportunity, a new brand, a business vertical, a fantastic product, a new market or a new community. And thank heavens for that! This is the list that keeps getting made, re-made, and edited as we go along. This is the list that reminds you and your organization, as to what your purpose is, what you have accomplished and what your journeys are going to be. Most successful organizations do both - manage the now and innovate for the near tomorrow. But what makes this simpler, faster and better?

1. Embrace diversity and collaboration

The Great Depression of the 1930s was a difficult time for businesses of all sizes, but despite the downturn, some companies founded during the great depression, like American Airlines, HBO and Microsoft (founded during the 1975 oil-embargo recession) are considered as the posterchildren of technological and entrepreneurial success today. The 2009 recession in the US spawned digital first businesses and unicorns like Slack (productivity software), WhatsApp (multimedia messaging) and Square (Digital Payments provider). Problems are great design opportunities in work clothes. And profitable ones make for great ventures.

There are examples of how the right climate for ideas and creativity can help society turn more innovative. Entrepreneur Frans Johansson's book, The Medici Effect,?dwells on a family that lived in Italy 700 years ago and changed history and the course of creativity and scientific progress forever.

During the 15th century, the Medici family in Italy sponsored artists, philosophers, scientists and financiers from diverse fields. The most prominent role of the Medici family to bring in a multidisciplinary innovation by making people of different intellect come together, led eventually to the historical period of innovation known as the Renaissance. This era saw the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Galileo Galilei, Raphael and Botticelli. “The Medici effect” is a practical illustration of how innovation flourishes when ideas and concepts from diverse disciplines, fields and cultures intersect.

Even 2000 years back this was the same case. Be it the case of the Romans who combined civil engineering, hydraulics, materials science and geography to develop the aqueduct system or the Navratnas (nine gems of the court) under Vikramaditya's reign / Akbar's empire where multi-disciplinarity led to transformative reforms and progress.

2. Stay design-alert for Innovation

Little do we realize that most often innovation is sitting right under our nose! As a business, a maker, a founder, a brand or as an organization one has to creatively reimagine every day. For out of syllabus problems, you need out of the box solutions, exceptional new products and services. This requires an entrepreneurial instinct and culture to help you bring transformative ideas to life. And this can be cultivated within your organization with the right design partners.

Customers rejecting new products & services, brands failing to attract customer love, visitors finding your experience not intuitive enough, apps struggling to rise above mediocrity, websites not delivering on productivity, associates not inspired enough to discover new futures and new initiatives failing to get traction and revenue. These are all what we call as design alerts. The market/s are giving a signal to act. If one is alert to these design signals and is agile enough to act upon them, one can transform.

Look around you. The world is increasingly becoming more design conscious. Soap cases, car keys, mobile phones, store experience, merchandise and packaging. Design and insightful good design that persuades and influences customers is all around us, across sectors and industries.

A customer's experience with good design makes her/him fall out of love with those products & services that don’t quite make the grade with their design and experience quotient. And this has an adverse impact on growth, productivity and profitability in those businesses. Hence every design-alert step your organization takes today, compounds its success and growth multifold for the future.

3. Get entrepreneurial with Venture Design

(1) Take design out of its templates. Design has an incredible ability to build beautiful products and services, transform experiences and create impact for communities. Increasingly so, customers and users are getting used to expect well designed products and services - and this is becoming a non-compromise. But this ability of design to transform and trance-form is a function of how much you stretch it as a practice or work with strategic partners that can help you with this. Allowing room and budgets for speculative design, prototypes and new ventures is the best way to test this for your organization.

(2) Make design a lead function of your business’s strategic toolbox. Strategic design is a multi-vitamin that gives you superpowers and makes you and your team far more innovative and impactful. And the leading brands and businesses have realized earlier than others that design is far more than good-looking. And yes, at the same time, it does makes things more beautiful. By working with multidisciplinary venture design teams, you can truly multiply your organization's ability to innovate and conceptualize.

Venture Design - two words with many adventures in between. Click to read.

New exponential ideas and innovations are what propel us and our organizations towards growth and development. These are the source codes of new ventures and new businesses. And this needs both method and creativity. This is what Venture Design helps with. As a practice Venture Design helps organizations and founders grow and build transformative ideas into launch-ready products, services and impactful experiences.

One surefire way is through unusual methods that take your organization close to original ideas and untemplated thinking. Working with Venture Designers and Maker Communities can help you generate, test and design-prototype productive ideas in an agile format. This can be done by diversifying and breaking the "in the box" thinking and cultivating an "out of the box" mindset within organizations.

Role of design in innovation and new futures

Design has two interlinked parts - thinking and doing. One is a noun and the other a verb. And design is not finished till both are done.

Design thinking builds alignment as insights around the product or service are translated into design criteria (the making criteria). It helps move the product team/founder team towards what really matters to users, what makes customers’ lives better with the product or service.

Design doing takes over the execution part to grow serious desirability for these products, services and ventures. This helps products and businesses, create and grow a unique character and a high degree of differentiation which helps them stand out in a sea of sameness. By aligning form, function & flavor, design makes your product/business more desirable.

Venture Design as a practice, bridges both and brings in a community of makers and creators to help transform ideas into tangible, launch-ready products and services.

Unusual thinking & methods help in a world where business is not usual and where problems are out of syllabus. It is best to skip the herd mentality and experience the new. New Gold after all comes to those who venture further and farther.

Today for traditional organizations, large corporate houses, and businesses, agility is the most valuable currency. If as a business you are not imagining and acting upon threats to your normal yourself, someone else will be conceiving ventures and ideas that will simply disrupt you out of the market.

A McKinsey survey of more than 1,000 business leaders highlighted that 50 percent of revenues for the next five years would come from products and services that don’t exist today.

Venture design teams can be extremely productive for organizations both large and big, in co-ideating, co-creating and designing new ventures and products. The outside-in thinking which an interdisciplinary design partner brings is conducive for innovations and blue oceans.

As a venture development & business design firm, we are fortunate to see this manifest and happen across sectors, and across all sizes of organisations - from large traditional firms to agile startups, and from service firms to product companies. The ones who venture out of the box and templates, are rewarded by markets and consumers. The really forward-thinking organizations embrace the full multiplier force of strategic design.

So, as you prepare to welcome the new year and the seasons ahead, be sure to leave room for innovation and new adventures.

Know more about how Venture Design and Innovation can help you get more agile and entrepreneurial.