Design Thinking in Business and IT

Co-creation is different to customization as it is not about adding feature that customers ask for. It is all about understanding your customer’s needs so you can create an offering that is scalable and will appeal to many customers.

This is what human-centric innovation culture is all about – empowering each other and working as a group to create something where the sum total of the skills and abilities of the group is higher than its parts.

t is important to have the preparation part which starts with a kick-off call (or Scoping phase) with the customer.

The final objective of the ideation phase is to evaluate the ideas that were grouped in clusters and select the top ones for further development.

Don’t be afraid to fail
You will fail many times and there’s no reason to avoid failure as it is a great opportunity to learn. So stop thinking of it as a negative and embrace the opportunity in failing. There’s no point on holding on to an idea just because it seemed like a good one to start with. Extract the key learnings and then move on. One important part of the Design Thinking process is that it teaches you how to throw an idea away in favor of something better—even when the idea you throw away is your own.

icked problems”. Unlike straightforward everyday challenges, wicked problems usually require considerable time and effort to be spent to clarify the initial requirements which means that a large part of the problem consists in actually defining and shaping it.

Viability – “What can be financially viable?” Financial projections are key for business and this is an important part of the equation as we always need to keep an eye on the bottom line.

Feasibility– “What is technically feasible?” - technology is developing with an ever increasing speed and what we have achieved now was in the realm of dreams only a few decades ago. However, there are still certain constraints which need to be considered when applying design thinking, without limiting the ideation process but keeping in touch with reality.

Desirability– “What do people desire?” This builds on one of the main principles of design thinking the human-centred approach. Innovation needs to be attractive from the user’s and customer’s point of view as well as based on teamwork in order to be viable.

design thinking any idea is acceptable in the brainstorming or ideation phase which encourages participation and input. The term ‘thinking outside the box’ was actually coined by design thinking practitioners and it is important as it perfectly describes the fact that brainstorming encourages any idea to be brought into the equation.