Another phrase that has become a buzzword among businesses lately is “design thinking.”
It goes beyond product design, however.
Design thinking is a creative problem-solving approach that starts with the customers you are designing for and ends with innovative and meaningful products, services, programs or experiences that are tailor-made to suit their needs.
Fortune 500 companies such as Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Disney and GE have leveraged the intrinsic value of design thinking to build a competitive advantage that impacts the bottom line.
We asked Rex Lor, an expert on strategic innovation planning, design thinking and social business model generation, for some ways we all could adapt design thinking for our businesses:
Deeper understanding of your customer
At the core of design thinking is empathy for the people you are designing for.
It provides an extra step to go out of your comfort zones in order to explore a cultural phenomenon, observe how people behave and think and gain insights into what they need. Which leads to the next step …
Creating customer-centric solutions
Design thinking shifts the focus from a business-centric solution to that of a customer-centric one through a deeper understanding of the problems and needs of the consumers. Since solutions created through design thinking start with people, this diminishes the need to cross our fingers and hope that the solution works for our customers.
Radical collaboration
Radical collaboration calls for the creation of multidisciplinary teams coming from different departments in your company.
This type of collaboration leverages the expertise that can be gained from the unique perspective that each of the team member can provide in the problem-solving process.
Continuous feedback
Design thinking puts continuous engagement with people in the heart of the process in order to know what metrics drive success, and gain honest feedback.
The process encourages the designer to go back to the people they have reached out to in order to test the solution.
Applying design thinking both improves revenue by creating user-centric innovative solutions and can also help save money by directing attention to the specific solutions people need.
Design thinking also increases customer engagement and loyalty as the feedback process reinforces acceptance and ownership to the product or solution.
Lor will facilitate a workshop titled “Design thinking for innovation: Techniques and processes to create user-focused solutions in the workplace” on April 29-30, 2019, at the Inquirer Academy.
The course will guide participants to a creative and innovative problem-solving process that will help them design meaningful solutions and user-focused products, services, programs or experience.
The Inquirer Academy is at 4168 Don Chino Roces Ave. corner Ponte St., Makati City.
For more information about the workshop or if you would like to add your input on the article, you may e-mail ask@inquireracademy.com, call (632) 834-1557 or 771-2715 and look for Jerald Miguel or Karl Paz, or visit the website at www.inquireracademy.com.
The author is the executive director of Inquirer Academy.