As companies and governments are becoming more and more driven by digital technologies and software, so does the change rate. Handling this rapid change creates complex problems, and we are presented with a wide array of potential solutions that make it difficult to cut through the noise and identify the solution you really need.
Enter design thinking, the best tool for achieving breakthrough innovations by getting to the root of client requirements, increasing collaboration, and leveraging partnerships. It also helps break down problems, simplify processes, make sense of challenges, and improve user experience.
Design thinking helps you innovate by giving you the tools to develop a deep understanding of client requirements and promote partnerships with other organizations. We will take a closer look at how the design thinking process encourages and promotes these two essential aspects to propel you toward your organization’s best solution.
Requirements:
Design thinking, at its core, is a methodology used to solve problems involving people. The first step of the design thinking process is the Empathize phase. Empathizing begins with a deep understanding of the users involved in your product or service. Design thinking helps you get to the root of your client’s true problems, enabling you to extract their requirements and move forward with innovation. Through tools like personas and empathy maps, design thinking helps uncover their articulated and unarticulated needs to obtain their precise requirements.
Design thinking excels at distilling a large, complicated challenge into smaller, more manageable problems that can be tackled one by one, ensuring that user requirements are put front and center at all points of the design process. Once you have identified client requirements, you can then break down each problem into sub-problems to define the challenge you are looking to solve into a single statement.
Partnerships:
Taking risks is essential for pushing your business to the next level. Design thinking mitigates (and can even remove) the risk involved in innovation by involving strategic partnerships with other organizations.
Whether you are a large organization or a start-up, try looking to your professional network and beyond to partner with others you can synergize with. Start-ups benefit by having a large customer base and obtaining requirements. In contrast, larger organizations will find value in start-ups by having their requirements filled, and innovations brought in without the financial and time to market risks had they tried to achieve it themselves.
Partnering with non-profit organizations can be advantageous as well. Rather than one start-up approaching many larger companies, the non-profit brings forward a portfolio of start-ups they are working with to a more established company. For example, Invest Ottawa in Ottawa, MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, and BetaWorks in New York are organizations that work to help start-ups by creating relationships and partnerships between start-ups and more established organizations.
Try leveraging your professional network or reaching out to a non-profit organization specializing in accelerating start-ups to partner with other organizations. Building strategic partnerships help to create new value propositions – whether it’s trying out a new idea, getting groups of users in front of your product, or obtaining data for testing!
Spring2 Innovation regularly delivers public training for professionals of all levels and in all sectors to teach them how to leverage design thinking as they embark on a new design (or redesign) of products, policies, programs, and other services.
To learn more about design thinking or to become Design Thinking Certified with Spring2 Innovation, please contact training@spring2innovation.com.