Design Thinking and Its Importance in Business Innovation
Innovation in a business is absolutely necessary. With innovation, a business will continue to be relevant when changes continue to occur. To continue to drive innovation in a business, you can use Design Thinking. What is Design Thinking and what is its role in innovation? Let's dissect the definition of design thinking and how to implement it in a business.
Initially, Design Thinking was only popular among designers. However, it turns out that Design Thinking can be applied in various fields, both for creative and business fields. Because Design Thinking has an approach based on a human perspective.
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is an approach to solving problems and getting the best solutions creatively that focuses on humans.
Referring to the definition from IDEO, Design Thinking is an innovative approach that is centered on humans by using designer work tools to integrate customer needs, technological possibilities, and requirements for business success. Design Thinking began to be popularized by IDEO since 1991.
Lately, Design Thinking has become very popular. Design Thinking is one of the keys to the success of large companies in the world such as Google, Toyota, Apple, and many other large companies.
Design Thinking combines creative and critical thinking. Although it begins with the word "design," this approach includes not only creative aspects, but also analytical aspects.
With Design Thinking, the problem-solving process is carried out by utilizing intuitive abilities in understanding the root of the problem that occurs.
So how can Design Thinking be implemented in business?
After using intuitive abilities, the next step is to use rational and analytical abilities. Because business cannot run only with feelings. It needs rational thinking.
What is the Purpose of Design Thinking?
The main purpose of Design Thinking is to provide solutions to problems faced by humans.
However, because the use of Design Thinking has reached the business and company level, various expectations and goals are highly expected from the implementation of Design Thinking.
The goals of Design Thinking that companies usually expect are as follows:
- Producing new products/services that can be relevant to the market and answer the problems of the target market.
- Helping to develop the practical and innovative abilities of the team to solve problems that exist in the company.
What is the Main Focus of Design Thinking?
Design Thinking has a different focus from other innovation approaches.
Other innovation approaches are technology-based and competitor-based. While Design Thinking is an innovation approach that is customer-centric. The main focus of Design Thinking is to focus on identifying problems and solving problems with solutions that are centered on humans. So that the solutions produced are solutions that are really needed by humans.
How Does Design Thinking Work?
In simple terms, Design Thinking combines the human perspective with what technology is feasible and the right business model as well.
When visualized, Design Thinking is in the middle of the shading between Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility.
Desirability: What do people need?
Feasibility: What is technically possible in the future?
Viability: What could possibly be a sustainable business model?
5 Stages of Design Thinking
So how do you actually think using Design Thinking?
Design Thinking helps you transform abstract ideas or thoughts into concrete implementations. Ideas that come from your business team will be more structured and organized to produce product and service innovations.
So what are the steps that need to be taken to use Design Thinking?
In the Stanford Design Thinking Model, there are five stages that need to be passed, namely empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
1. Empathize
Every time a problem or issue occurs, it is necessary to identify what is actually happening or what the root of a problem is.
To be able to find the root of the problem, we need to use our conscience by empathizing.
Empathy is also an important start to creating meaningful innovation. Because the most important thing about innovation is how much we know about the users of our products and their lives.
Empathy is the ability to understand and feel the feelings or experiences of others as if we were experiencing them ourselves.
So what needs to be done in this empathy stage. You can do the following:
- Interview
- Shadowing, a method to reveal how the person being observed behaves in a certain context and how he or she experiences the situation.
From the above methods, interviews are the most effective way to explore the problems of our consumers. While shadowing is effective for seeing needs or potential that are not recognized by our consumers.
The thing to remember is when empathizing with user problems, don't try to judge, try to bring up a high sense of curiosity, be open-minded, optimistic, and respect each other.
2. Define
After exploring what our consumers are actually complaining about and need, the next step is to define what is happening.
Sometimes users are aware that they are having trouble doing certain things, but they can't name what the problem is.
In this stage, it is important to define consumer needs. The most important thing in the define stage is to frame the problems faced by consumers correctly to produce the best solution.
For example, an e-commerce company wants to improve the user experience in the checkout process which is often abandoned by customers before completing a purchase.
After conducting observations and interviews, the main problem was found, namely that many users felt the checkout process was too long and complicated.
The root of the main problem has been found, then the problem needs to be defined. This definition process is like the process of formulating a problem in a scientific paper. From the case example, the problem is defined in the following question:
"How do I simplify the checkout process so that customers find it easier and faster to complete their purchases?"
With the right define stage, the team can ensure that all solutions produced are truly focused on problems that are relevant to users.
3. Ideate
Once you can define the problem clearly and precisely, it's time to explore by coming up with brilliant and brilliant ideas.
However, the thing to remember is that in this ideate stage it is not just about the right idea, but the process of generating as many solution ideas and possibilities as possible.
The most important thing in this ideate stage is to create, generate, or come up with ideas based on the right perspective.
The expected result of this ideate stage is to get as many ideas as possible that can answer the needs, fears, and problems of our target users.
There are several ways you can do to dig up ideas, namely:
- Research
- Brainstorm
- Discuss
There is an easy way to generate as many solution ideas as possible with the "How Might We" formula. Question all possibilities with "How Might We."
- How: Assume that there is a solution to every challenge/problem.
- Might: It doesn't matter if there is no solution
- We: Something that we think can be achieved.
4. Prototype
Solution ideas have been obtained, now is the time to make a prototype of your idea to make it concrete from an idea that is still abstract.
The purpose of this prototype stage is to ensure that the product/service/solution created is in accordance with the target consumer.
In addition, another goal is to plan that later this product/service/solution will get positive feedback from users.
In making this prototype, you don't need to wait until it is perfect until all the features are complete. You can make a prototype of the minimum version or what is commonly called the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
5. Test
After the prototype has been created, to determine the effectiveness of the prototype, it needs to be tested directly on potential consumers.
This is the stage where you can test the hypothesis that you created and poured into a prototype, test your empathy, and get ready to get feedback from consumers of your product.
Test and measure the user experience in relation to the customer journey.
This stage is also important to understand the solution you have created and the needs of your consumers.
What are the advantages of Design Thinking?
The benefits of Design Thinking are not only felt by businesses and companies, but also individuals. Here are the advantages of Design Thinking that are felt by each individual in an organization:
- Makes you think out of the box.
- Makes you break through the boundaries of your own thinking.
- Sharpens the way you think critically and creatively.
While here are the advantages of Design Thinking from a business perspective:
- Understand consumer problems in depth
- Reduce the risk of failure of solution ideas because they have been tested
- Solution ideas that are collected come from various parties.
- Prototype iterations so that solution ideas can be adopted quickly.
- Improve better collaboration.
What are the Weaknesses of Design Thinking?
Behind its popularity, there are various criticisms that indicate the weaknesses of Design Thinking. Here are some weaknesses of Design Thinking:
- The overly structured Design Thinking process is considered by designers to limit creative thinking.
- Design Thinking is glorified as a two-day workshop that solves all company problems. In fact, it is not like that, you still need to iterate even after the workshop ends.
- If you fail to interpret or define user problems, the threat of failure will be right in front of your eyes.
What is the Relationship between Design Thinking and Business?
Based on research results contained in the 2016 Intellectual Economic, Design Thinking has a close relationship with business, namely as a tool used to develop skills and abilities to recognize new drivers in innovating according to design thinking.
In addition, the relationship with other businesses is to ensure that your business will continue to produce value that is beneficial to users. Businesses continue to provide innovation that is valuable to consumers.
With the main goal being for your business to survive in an increasingly competitive and uncertain situation.
When Do You Need to Use Design Thinking?
The right time to use Design Thinking is when you find a complex problem in business that is related to people.
Or when you want to innovate by developing new products in a shorter time frame.
The right time to use Design Thinking is when:
- Facing a complex problem that does not have a clear solution.
- Requires a deep understanding of users.
- Want to create a user-focused solution.
- Being in a rapidly changing environment.
- Requires cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Has Your Company Started Implementing Design Thinking?
The existence of Design Thinking is important for developing product innovation from a business. Innovation keeps a business relevant, as long as the innovation is based on consumer needs.
Do you want to learn and implement Design Thinking for your company? Prasmul-Eli provides on-site Design Thinking training for you and your team to be able to drive business innovation in a company. You will learn accompanied by professional coaches. Prasmul-Eli's Design Thinking training has also been certified ISO 9001:2015.
Is your company ready to innovate using Design Thinking?
