Have you ever wondered how entrepreneurs come up with good ideas?
One tool employed to spark innovation is design thinking, Dr Ivano Bongiovanni speaks to Ellen Rossiter about the benefits the process brings to businesses. A structured approach to galvanising innovation, design thinking incorporates three key stages:
1) Inspiration
โTo find your inspiration, keep customers at the forefront of your mind,โ explains Ivano. โFocus on their needs, identify their feelings and use these insights to inspire innovation.
โItโs not about market research, itโs about stepping into your customersโ shoes, so you understand the frustrations they encounter and their needs. One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is to distance themselves from people. Bring your customers on-board and involve them in the creative process.
โMeet customers in person, as this will provide far richer insights than requesting they fill in a feedback form. Based on the information gleaned, create usersโ journey maps and personas of typical users, to deepen your understanding. Donโt discount details, what may at first seem superfluous can prove central to developing effective solutions.
โGo through the same experiences as your customers, identify the pain points on their journey and the problems they encounter. Consider your company website, for example, do the web pages download quickly, are the links easy to find and do they work? Can customers filter out information thatโs irrelevant to them? What problems do they encounter on their journey through the website?
โTim Brown, one of the doyens of design thinking, sees a problem identified as a source of inspiration and the springboard from which business opportunities may follow.โ
2) Ideation
โAfter identifying your inspiration, next comes the brainstorming or โIdeationโ stage. Bring a multi-disciplinary team together and come up with as many original solutions as possible. The ideas may seem contradictory and divergent, but at this early stage, the more wide-ranging the ideas, the better.
โInvolve people from a variety of professional backgrounds, who bring different skills, perspectives and insights to the table. Design thinking is not solely for designers, itโs a team effort, itโs about bringing people together, rather than working in silos. The key message is that itโs ok to sit down together, to acknowledge a problem, to discuss potential solutions and how you can make them viable.โ
3) Implementation
โOnce youโve gathered your initial ideas together, select the most desirable and feasible with a view to developing them. At this point, youโll find the ideas begin to come together rather than diverge. Prototype your chosen innovation, test it with customers, refine it and test again, gathering feedback all the while so you can make further improvements until you reach your final version.
โWithin as little as six weeks, during an Innovation Sprint with a multi-disciplinary team, Iโve seen solutions created for businesses, with a clear idea of what the endpoint will be and with work underway on a prototype.โ
Be human-centric
โHarnessing design thinking is not necessarily about using technological innovations, itโs the end userโs needs, not technology, that drives innovation. Moreover, these innovations may be centred on service, experiences or processes as much as technology or products. You might say that design-led innovation is technology agnostic. Be human-centric rather than technology-centric in developing solutions.
โImagine, youโre looking at how passengers progress through airport security โ what are the frustrations they encounter? How can you make the process run more smoothly or the experience less onerous? Can you remove unnecessary holdups and provide information about the reason for them when they are unavoidable? Can improving the customer experience present additional business opportunities? Design-led innovation bring focuses on satisfying customersโ needs, while leveraging technological affordances and meeting business requirements.
โThere is a risk of failure, you have to be happy to take that risk, but the upside of successfully introducing innovation largely outweighs the risk of failure. Ultimately, a design which is driven by peopleโs needs is more likely to have a positive impact on businesses than technology-led innovation. This is why design thinking, which keeps people at the heart, has helped businesses to increase profits and assist public sector organisations to save money and produce greater value for citizens.โ
The power of creativity
โDonโt underestimate the power of creativity. Design thinking is all about recognising the importance of creativity in todayโs life. Sometimes itโs assumed that creativity is not needed in business, but this is far from being the case. Embracing creativity can lead to unconventional but brilliant ideas being explored.
โSometimes offbeat ideas lead to something amazing and therein lies the value of creativity, it can help in looking at problems from a different perspective and coming up with a fresh solution. The creative process is inspiring and can very helpful to business.
โDesign thinking has been criticised for re-inventing the wheel, for bringing jargon to what is merely common sense, but donโt let a perceived lack of uniqueness detract from its value. Being pricey and impractical are also criticisms levelled at the approach, yet design thinking can be bound by limited resources and time. These boundaries, moreover, can help galvanise innovation. Bite-sized, Design Sprints of 5 days, have proven a good starting point for developing innovations. Necessity may indeed be the mother of invention.
โThere are many unmapped needs out there and as business people we need to take the time to find them, to see problems as our inspiration and our opportunity. Identifying problems and finding solutions can open up businesses to new markets. There are many opportunities out there if we respond to customer needs and design thinking provides a powerful tool for bringing businesses and customers together for the advantage of all concerned.โ
Dr Ivano Bongiovanni
Ivano.bongiovanni@glasgow.ac.uk
Research Fellow (Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow)
Digital Fellow (Chair in Digital Economy, QUT Brisbane)