How Design Thinking Adds Value to Your Business?

Businesses must be adaptable and well-equipped to manage change on a continuous basis in order to flourish — especially if they want to improve their products, services, and interactions with customers and employees. For any company that wants to stay competitive, the Design Thinking technique is not only beneficial, but also crucial.

Many of the best-known methods of the design-thinking discovery process relate to identifying the “job to be done.”

Companies that are successful are constantly looking for new methods to compete in the marketplace. Design thinking is one method that has taken the corporate world by storm.

But, what is design thinking and how does it add value to business?

What is Design Thinking?

It is tied to a better future and aims to build up ideas rather than breaking them down, as critical thinking does. A design mindset is solution-focused and action-oriented, which involves analysis and creativity.

To explore the possibilities of what could be and to develop desired outcomes that benefit the end user, design thinking employs logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning — the customer.

Informs Human-Centred Innovation

By including clients in a succession of prototypes to learn, test, and refine concepts, design thinking reduces the uncertainty and risk of innovation. Customers’ insights from real-world experiments are what design thinkers rely on.

Human-centred innovation begins with gaining an understanding of unmet or unarticulated requirements among clients or users. According to Jeanne Liedtka, author of Solving Problems with Design Thinking, in an article in the Batten Review, customers’ unspoken requirements are the most reliable source of fresh ideas with a true competitive edge and thus bigger margins.

Valuable for Products and Services

According to 2015 assessments by the Design Management Institute, design-led companies such as Apple, Coca Cola, IBM, and Nike have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past ten years by an extraordinary 211%.

Engineering-driven innovation has given way to design-driven innovation, which has evolved from product-centric to customer-centric, and marketing-focused to user-experience-focused.

Design thinking as an approach used by designers to tackle complicated problems and discover attractive solution for clients, results in great design. It has been used by organizations to re-invent the way they innovate.

Leadership

While being a good designer takes years of practice, you can design the way you lead, manage, create, and innovate by thinking like a designer. Setting a strategic intention is the first step in design. You’re designing if you’re laying out a strategy. To think like a designer, you don’t have to be one.

Conclusion

Design Thinking have been used by organizations to better empathize and understand customers. Understanding your customers is important, but it’s only one part of the equation when it comes to moving your company forward.

By fully embracing the Design Thinking methodology across your organization, you’ll be setting yourself up for successful visioning, compelling value propositions, improving workplace culture, and reframing challenges — all of which are critical to improving products, services, processes, and building long-term business models.

Learn more about Design Thinking as one of Digital Innovation Strategy on Multimatics!