How design thinking can generate great business ideas
I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur but I’m still waiting for the right idea to strike. I’m sure many of you are the same.
Luckily, I’ve recently come across some great techniques for coming up with solid business ideas. With minimal effort or time needed. Here they are, going from OK to really good:
1/ Ask Elon Musk.
Ok, bit of a joke one, but this twitter feed generates smart Elon Musk-type ideas for creating disruptive startups.
2/ Take reeeally long showers and use this time to brainstorm.
It’s proven that this environment is highly conducive to idea generation.
3/ Write down 10 ideas every day.
I’m a big fan of serial entrepreneur James Altucher. He also believes that your creativity is a muscle that needs to be exercised — just like any other part of your body. This post explains why and how.
4/ Harness design thinking in a 60 minute workshop with a few random people.
Design thinking is a big part of my work as an experience strategist at SapientNitro. But it was only when I recently took part in a free workshop by ustwo and hyperisland, that I realised just how effective it could be to come up with great business ideas in a short amount of time.
In this blogpost I’d love to share with you the secrets of the design thinking process and how it can be done by absolutely anyone who’s interested enough to try.
For those interested, I will attach some more links on design thinking at the bottom of this post.
Unearthing a customer need (Takes 15 minutes approx.)
All good business ideas are like all good design. You have to start by unearthing a human problem or need that begs to be addressed.
At the start of the workshop, we were split into random groups of four. Whilst introducing ourselves, we were asked to describe an important purchase that we had made recently.
Our first group task was then to choose one of them and delve deeper into it. Why had it been important?
At the heart of every purchase is a human problem or need which that product/service is bought to solve. Regardless of whether it was a functional, shallow or long-planned purchase, we bought it because we had a “job to be done”.
In our group’s case, my neighbour had just bought a ticket to New York.
Simple enough. But through some deeper questioning we discovered that there was an interesting reason behind her big spending.
In fact, she had just exited a very serious relationship. As a result, she bought the ticket because she desperately needed a way to “escape”.
“I needed to rediscover myself, to become me again, to reset”
Setting constraints (5 minutes)
As a result of this discussion, the idea of “resetting oneself” became our chosen need.
Whatever you decide is crucially important since the solution will ultimately stem from this. But there’s also no right answer — any number of phrasings will lead to interesting results.
We then used it to formulate a “How might we” question.
This creates the boundaries within which we come up with ideas. It’s otherwise known as a “creative brief”.
In our case, our brief became “How might we help people to reset following a breakup?”
It helps to be quite specific with this because there is plenty of evidence that creativity thrives under a decent amount of constraint.
The Renaissance period is uncontroversially one of the richest periods for art. Yet artists had very restrictive themes, materials and sizes imposed on them by the churches that commissioned them.
No money for ads forced startup technology companies like Airbnb to get creative with their marketing. (Resulting in the now infamous techniques known as growth hacking).
“Design depends largely on constraints” (Charles Eames)
Coming up with ideas (20 minutes)
Now we used our “How might we question” to come up with ideas.
Even with this though, it’s still easy to come up with ideas that aren’t that interesting. A good shortcut to getting to more radical ideas is The Mash-up Exercise, which is what we used.
Mash-up exercise:
- Firstly, you come up with some data points. An example of a data point would be height. Another could be GDP. They can be related to the brief or not at all. Just write them down on post-its or onto a big sheet of paper.
- Next, brainstorm as many services as possible and write them down too. For example, Snapchat, Tinder and Made.com are all services. Digital-based services are more likely to be interesting and novel. After a few minutes, you should now have a large canvas of notes from which to develop interesting and valuable ideas.
- You then take turns to pick one data source and one service post-it. The aim is to connect these two nuggets of information to create a solution answering our “How might we” question.
For example, the two puzzle pieces could be ‘genetic information’ and ‘eventbrite’.
Therefore, a potential solution that “helps people reset” could be an events-finder service that uses your genetic information to find the most relevant events for you.
I hope your solutions wouldn’t all be as rubbish as this one I just made up. Use your group to come up with solutions together as this part of the exercise is hard.
Ensure that your solutions are always directed towards answering your “How might we” question. This is crucial because it is what ensures your solution is still solving a true human need.
If solving a true human need was obvious or easy, eight out of ten startups wouldn’t fail within 18 months. Was “the smart waterbottle” really solving anyone’s needs?
Choosing & developing the best idea (15 minutes)
Once you have a good number of ideas (hopefully at least four), then it’s time to choose the best one.
Give each team member two or three votes and let them select their favourite using a marker or sticky dots.
A few worn brain cells later, you have your group’s chosen idea!
All that’s left is to flesh it out a bit and then to pitch it to another group and collect their feedback.
In this way, you can validate whether the idea was a good one and what could be done to improve it further — building on the knowledge of others.
Below was our idea and how we laid it out concisely for our pitch. We also sketched it out to make it tangible. (Sadly I don’t have any of the original documents left)
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a storyboard or just a picture with some writing as long but it helps get the message across quickly.
Our final idea:
A cleaning service for your ex’s stuff, partnered with eBay. (We picked family and eBay from the Mash-up)
What insight supports it?
One of the hardest parts of getting over your ex is having their stuff lie around after they’re gone.
How does it work?
You or your family (to help you out) would contact the service and for free they would pick up the stuff you choose and take it away to be sold on eBay. The service’s revenue comes from taking a cut of the money made on eBay, with the rest going to the customer.
Conclusion and learnings
This is a rough and ready process. Of course I can’t guarantee that it will always come up with great ideas.
And it’s clear that before continuing you would need to quantify the true size of the market for your need and solution with some more robust data.
But the beauty of this process lies in its simplicity.
Interestingly, the other biggest thing I learnt was about diversity:
Our randomly-assembled team was pretty diverse in terms of backgrounds, and I realised that as we went through the process — deciding the brief, the mashup exercise, selecting ideas — there were so many ideas and thoughts that I would never have come up with myself.
That sounds so obvious but I’d never experienced it so visibly. It’s clear to me now that having as many people unlike you involved is absolutely crucial to coming up with strong and interesting ideas.
Thanks so much for reading, hope you find this exercise valuable or at least interesting!
Please follow me if you want to keep reading about my learnings as a junior experience strategist.
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Further reading:
A simple & visual summary of design thinking.
A New York Times article on how to apply design thinking to your own life.
A Jobs-to-be-done cheatsheet, to help you get to the heart of what customers are really using your product or service for.
The Mash-up exercise, explained in greater detail by HyperIsland.
