Be clairvoyant
A look at the Visioning phase of the Business Design process
Note: The following is the second in a four-part series detailing the phases of NEXT’s Business Design process, which takes teams of innovators from an initial insight to a fully-fledged business case.
“Vision animates, inspires, transforms purpose into action,” said American academic Warren Bennis, a world-renowned pioneer of leadership studies.
In NEXT’s Visioning phase, team members will do just that, fuelled by their Creative Question, which was established during the Sensing phase. Teams will first diverge, generating as many ideas as possible, before converging on “bright” key ideas (features) that will be combined to create a Value Proposition and Solution.
More than a feeling
The Visioning phase will begin with team members diverging, as they attempt to come up with as many ideas as possible using methodology and best practices for effective and productive brainstorming. To create these ideas, teams will make use of lateral and visual thinking in a variety of fun and engaging Design Tasks.
Creating ideas, however, is not the sole purpose of the Visioning phase. And neither will these ideas be based on mere hunches or potentialities. Teams have access to nearly 20 missions, each designed to inspire and aid in the creation, cultivation, and selection of new ideas, eventually leveraging feasibility and impact to converge on a handful “bright” key ideas that will be combined to create a Value Proposition.
Examples of missions that occur during the Visioning phase include:
- Neue Kombinationen — Leverage building blocks from leading-edge start-ups to generate new concepts or ideas.
- Brainsketching — Get a first burst of ideas onto paper by quickly and silently sketching them.
- Analogies For Inspiration — Generation fresh ideas by looking at the topic through a different yet familiar lens.
- Random Force — Forces a connection between two dissimilar things to spark original ideas.
- Define Value Proposition — Ensure a strong match between product features and the original problem. The Value Proposition is the culmination of the Solution you create in the Visioning phase.
What’s it worth?
At the end of the Visioning phase, you will have captured those ideas with the highest levels of both impact and feasibility. These ideas yield a Solution to the problem posed in the Creative Question determined during the Sensing phase.
After finding this Solution, teams will be able to pinpoint their project’s Value Proposition (i.e. why it is different, worth buying, or sponsoring).
Stay tuned for next week’s entry to the “Business Design process” series: Prototyping.
Contributing editor: Adam Kohut
