IDT Module 4
IDT Module 4
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MODULE-4
DESIGN THINKING FOR STRATEGIC INNOVATIONS
A lot of companies struggle when attempting to achieve their growth and innovation targets with
traditional frameworks.
On a business level, traditional strategic management is primarily concerned with where to play and how to
win. Where to play is framed as a choice of industry and product/market combination. Simply speaking, you
pick an industry, say air transportation, and a market, for example continental flights in the United States, and
you define your offering within this market, for example low-cost direct city-to-city flights.
How to win is mostly defined as achieving competitive advantage. Michael Porter’s classic generic choices
about how to achieve competitive advantage are to either
(1) product leadership (offer the best product by focusing on product innovation);
Strategy development and execution thereby follow a linear process of analyzing the situation and
environment, followed by developing a strategy, and finally executing it. The underlying principle is that the
development of the strategy has to be completed before the strategy can be executed.
To be clear: we don’t suggest that these traditional strategic management approaches do not work. For some
organizations and in certain industries, they work extremely well, if applied in the right way. Yet a lot of
companies also struggle when attempting to achieve their growth and innovation targets with these traditional
frameworks.
How does our take on strategic innovation differ from these more traditional approaches?
First of all, we shift the objective from focusing on achieving competitive advantage by simply being cheaper
or different to finding and seizing opportunities by creating value. Traditional strategy is focused on the
company, trying to position the company as being a cost leader, being different, focusing on a niche, or
something similar, as we have seen. But being cheaper or different alone is simply no longer enough to be
successful (if it ever was).
Being cheaper or different alone is simply no longer enough to be successful (if it ever was).
The Art of Opportunity takes an entrepreneurial stance, looking beyond positioning your company to a larger
holistic perspective that involves creating value for your customer, your firm, and your business ecosystem.
Only by creating value for a multitude of stakeholders does your company have the potential to be successful.
And creating value is achieved through more than simply offering a cheap or different product, to include
products, services, the entire customer experience (CX), your business model, and your revenue model.
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consumption, and hurdles to satisfaction. Opportunities are a function of the chosen customer segment, its
needs, and expectations toward the solution offering, and current barriers to consumption or hurdles to a
satisfactory customer experience.
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● Offering: The unique blend of products, services, and the customer experience.
1. Customer value: Solving your customers’ needs better than anybody else by removing barriers to
consumption and hurdles to satisfaction.
2. Firm value: Crafting a strategy that will generate value for your company in terms of opening up
further opportunities and operational and financial benefits.
3. Ecosystem value: Creating strategic, operational, and financial value for your partners and the larger
ecosystem your company is embedded in and relies on.
Finally, we show how the process for strategy making and execution and for building new growth businesses
is neither entirely linear nor completely iterative. Instead we will illustrate how companies go through an
iterative process consisting of three phases characterized by a bias toward action over analysis and planning.
In short, business design thinking is a collection of principles (of which visual thinking is a key methodology)
to help understand, address and develop solutions to business problems. It can also be considered a strategic
mindset (or way of working) that focuses on understanding audiences, visualizing ideas and information,
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working collaboratively and learning iteratively, all while keeping an eye on a holistic picture. This approach
has been proven to open new channels to creativity, actively engage participants and stakeholders, build
clarity and consensus, and accelerate speed to market.
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Prepared by Mr. Santoshkumar M, GMIT, Davangere
INNOVATION and DESIGN THINKING [21IDT19]
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The five principles of business design thinking
1. Keep a human-centered focus: Put people, not objects, at the heart of your story. An empathetic,
human-centered focus creates value for not only the customer, but all stakeholders, including
employees, shareholders, suppliers, and vendors.
2. Think visually and tell stories: Visualization enables us to more easily and clearly share our ideas
and develop them with others. Visual storytelling brings ideas to life and creates the understanding and
alignment that accelerates decision making.
3. Work and co-create collaboratively: Bring together diverse perspectives. Creating solutions to a
shared problem within a multi-disciplinary group builds support and can generate breakthrough ideas.
4. Evolve through active iteration: Build to understand. Iteration enables you to learn reflectively during
the process of creation. The result is quicker, more successful adaptation and evolution of your ideas,
solutions and/or strategies.
5. Maintain a holistic perspective: View the organization as a dynamic, open system of interrelated
processes. This vantage point can help you identify opportunities to break down silos, improve
efficiency, and create context for understanding.
The Art of Opportunity incorporates each of the five principles of business design thinking to embody the
practitioner’s way of working. Most prominently we have incorporated visual thinking—from illustrations
that accelerate understanding of new ideas to visually-based activities and templates to drive clarity, spur
collaboration and build support. The process encourages cyclical development that supports iterative learning
and we actively promote identification of value through holistic perspectives.
Executives applying the business design thinking way of working will develop capabilities and practices
different from those of their peers. We admit we’re biased. We have seen how businesses can apply business
design thinking to create the greatest value for their customers, employees, and ecosystems. Employees feel
empowered to use their judgment to make decisions. They are trusted and supported to do the right thing and
rewarded for their creativity and initiative. Customers appreciate the resulting quality and value provided by
the firm’s products and services, thereby increasing the firm’s financial and brand value. Partners within the
ecosystem gain value similarly, through increased business and by association with the firm.
Getting started
Our research has found that growth initiatives have a greater chance of success when they share the following
common characteristics:
Of these characteristics, the most critical is a dedicated, diverse team. You will need a mix of interdisciplinary
thinkers representing key stakeholder groups to execute the strategic innovation process. Seek individuals
who can devote (or have been given leave to dedicate) the required time and possess the following business
design thinking skills, characteristics, and capabilities:
● Applies an open mind and actively uses experimentation and iteration to solve problems.
● Empathizes with others and keeps the customer/user at the center of every decision.
● Sees the bigger picture — and finds connections between seemingly unrelated points and processes.
● Feels comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.
● Can express themselves clearly (whether using visual thinking or not) and engages in open,
meaningful dialogue.
● Co-creates and collaborates with individuals and teams.
● Has a growth mind-set, which is a passion for learning rather than a hunger for approval
GROWTH
Growth is also the very essence of entrepreneurship, including corporate entrepreneurship Most
businesses develop specific plans that, over time, will move their business to a level that meets the goals of
the executive team, the shareholders, and the investment community.
Growth means creating a clear and compelling vision of the future. Your vision needs to be very clear
in terms of what you want from your business The questions How do we plan to attach an adjacency? How
do we become the market leader? How about expanding to multiple geographies? And what’s in it for
managers and employees? Ultimately, the most meaningful yardstick is one that shows progress with respect
to an organization’s stated goals, whatever they are. So how do you develop your organization’s stated goals?
How do you develop the vision of where you want the organization to be in the future?
Interpretation of design thinking to Growth challenge: These frameworks allow people to benefit
from empathetic role-play and explore the goals, choices, decisions, motivations, actions, and successes and
failures in a more intuitive way Paths toward organizational transformation and growth can be communicated
effectively through the development of characters, personas, artifacts, and future-oriented archetypes that sit
within familiar narrative structures Stakeholders can easily identify, engage, debate, or learn by exploring
their choices, actions, and experiences within a variety of contexts and situations Narratives tie the past,
present, and future of an organization together.
What is Storytelling?
Designers use storytelling to get insight into users, build empathy and reach them emotionally. Designers
create personas to represent target users and add conflict to stories that reflect their user journeys and
problems. Crafting stories, designers can better understand what users want from a solution.
The renowned philosopher Aristotle wrote extensively on storytelling. His formula is a checklist for what
your stories should contain.
Your story narratives are “magic mirrors”—proving fine-tuned empathy and connection with users’
values—where users discover how to make their own happy endings. Ultimately, your design should predict
your target users’ actions at every level possible. Testing will help confirm how successful it is.
STRATEGIC FORESIGHT
What is Strategic Foresight?
Thinking about the Future
Thinking about the future is an innately human activity, practiced for millennia in order for us to
survive and evolve, and mainly concerned with short or medium-term horizons. Often beginning ten-years
out, strategic foresight gives us tools and methods to think about multiple futures in a way that helps us
anticipate change in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
Strategic foresight moves further upstream, where we identify weak signals, extrapolate trends and
examine the wider environment to frame different scenarios of how the world could be, creating insight and
catalysing change. The aim is not to pick a state and transition, but, to quote Sohail Inayatullah "continuously
investigate our assumptions of what we believe the future will or should be like."
A delivery robot photographe d in Palo Alto, near Institute for the Future
The goal of experiential futures is “the design of situations and stuff from the future to catalyze insight and
change (in the present)."
CHANGE – SENSEMAKING
Change is the heart of leadership, and leaders must understand its context before designing and
implementing any change program. Organizations need to plan for change. At a minimum, they should be
able to effectively react to problems as they arise. Simply stated, an organization that not only is prepared for
but expects change is one that can overcome challenges. where change is reshaping industries and
categories. Whether it’s the bursting economic bubbles of the past decade, shifts in regulations, competition
from emerging markets, new consumer expectations, or the impact of consumer conversations on the role,
value, and legitimacy of brands.
The research and literature on change indicate that the number one reason for the success or failure
of a change initiative hinges on the leadership skills, level of energy, and knowledge of the individuals
responsible for leading the change. For many companies, this resistance to change is the beginning of a
slow and continuous decline. Products become obsolete. Brands become irrelevant. Organizations become
complacent.
Organizational change ultimately comes down to dealing with three components
● Discrepancy
● Appropriateness
● Efficacy
Value redefinition is a design approach that helps develop a new voice and meaning that will not only resonate
with consumers but also sideswipe the competition Design thinking seeks relevance by promoting harmony
with the identities, aspirations, attitudes, beliefs, needs, and desires that shape the ways people perceive and
define value It aspires to develop greater empathy among people, brands, and business by observing,
engaging with, and listening closely to people The design thinking approach to redefining value begins with
people, not products It seeks to locate the functional, emotional, social, and cultural values that already exist
within or can be designed into a brand’s DNA and align those with the current and emerging values of
consumers value is associated with a product, service, system, artifact, or relationship that provides a means
to a desired end. Customer value is at the core of any competitive strategy and is often least managed, often
resulting in individual marketing, brand, product development, and pricing decisions being made rather than a
conscious strategic and design exercise being undertaken.
starting point to clarify how customers perceive and define the value of your brand or business:
● Identify the functional, social, cultural, and historical reasons that have driven value for your
brand, product, or business.
● Determine how your key customers rate you versus competitors on these value drivers
● Define and articulate each of these value drivers in the context of the users.
● Identify the rate of change on each of these dimensions and look for signals to confirm which
ones are slowing down and which ones are accelerating.
Interpretation of design thinking to Maintaining Relevance challenge: The following non exhaustive
attributes when thinking about customer value.
● How can you solve my problem quickly?
● How can you solve my problem the way I want it?
● How can you solve my problem anytime, anyplace?
● How can you solve a problem for me that I don’t want to know about?
● How can you solve a problem that I don’t even know I have?
Standardization is a necessary cost driver for every company. It is a means to achieve operational,
cost, and performance efficiencies by streamlining activities, leveraging technologies, and maintaining
employee workflow to reduce operating costs But standardizing practices can mean losing the personal touch,
reducing the choices customers have, and disconnecting employees To streamline operations and be as
profitably productive as possible, every company seeks to better leverage the powers of enterprise technology,
design rule-driven workflows, and automate repetitive tasks. It makes sense not to reinvent the wheel every
time you need to go for a drive. Like companies, many people prefer efficiency to inefficiency. We like
reliability. We like consistency. When a company’s primary focus is on making standardization its priority, it
can lose sight of the emotional quotient of its brand and alienate consumers. Like people, companies are
complex creatures, each with its own history, qualities, and characteristics that, when it comes to innovation,
Standardization can make internal processes more efficient and effective. It can clearly establish common
goals of performance that every employee must meet. It can provide common platforms that make a supply
chain run faster and cheaper. In some cases, the standardization of legacy manufacturing poses a big challenge
to innovation. when the client’s market research department has such a fixed and highly rigid way of
approaching, thinking about, and talking about customers and how it identifies their so-called needs using
words such as target, segment, actionable, and the worst ever, reason to believe, standardization becomes the
enemy of innovation Design Thinking Approach for Business Challenge (Standardization) Design thinkers
are sensitive to the human touch points that encourage and foster such emotions as profound moments of
attachment to a product, service, or brand. The lack of humanization in experiences is not always purposeful
but rather naturally occurs as standardization takes hold. Design thinkers remind businesses that they are
ultimately responding to human values, beliefs, and needs They understand that efficiency and
standardization will always have a place in business processes but recognize that it’s the human touch points
that resonate most in real-life customer experience to give products, services, and brands true value and
meaning Understanding culture means unpacking all the social meanings (and emotions) that define a
particular customer’s experience Design thinkers unpack each coffee context in search of humanization
opportunities Humanization doesn’t just come from culture; it is also produced from within cultures
Business process management is very important for any organization. It facilitates improving merits in
operational procedures in daily business of organizations by providing concepts and methods to capture
process and analysis. It has evolved as an organizational approach to structure and understands work
procedures with more clarity to drive the daily business operations with the goal of improving them. e.g. an
insurance company processing insurance claims. If five minutes time is saved on an average in the processing
time of a single claim, considerable resources can be saved on a large number of cases that an insurance
company deals with daily. From a business process management perspective, information about the persons,
conditions of insurance to be gathered to perform the tasks for processing a claim. The process can reveal
flaws and improvements for fast analysis and efficient processing. Design thinking can be used to capture and
validate end-users needs and envision new products and services for building prototypes. In the absence of
design Thinking such tangible prototypes are not feasible for complex software systems with multiple users.
In design thinking the first step is to get the requirements of a system for users, customers and other
stakeholders. Process models facilitate communication between different stakeholders such as business
analysts, process participants and software architects. These models provide a shared understanding to enable
all stakeholders to contribute to knowledge. Obtaining information and making process knowledge explicit is
the function of business process modeling. The models are captured as visual diagrams. Process models
provide information on roles, tasks, decisions, and information used. These models form the basis for
discussions between the stakeholders, such as process assistants who process claims in an insurance company,
managers to ensure claim processing quality, the top management looking for optimization and software
architects supporting work of the employees by providing adequate software systems.
In 1960 MIT professor, mathematician, and Meteorologist Edward Lorenz formulated a model of the
way air moves around the atmosphere, measuring changes in temperature, pressure, and velocity. By
Modelling Weather, Lorenz discovered not only the fundamental mechanism of deterministic Chaos – the
sensitive dependence on initial conditions or the “butterfly effect”-but also that long term weather forecasting
was impossible. Similarly, much of what we do in business strategy and planning is an attempt to predict the
future based on the present and past. Whether it is Business or any other systems-level organizational
challenges, design thinking helps to appreciate and make sense of the complex connections between people,
places, objects, events and ideas. Design Thinking is the most powerful driver of innovation, and guides long
range strategic planning. Design thinking shapes business decisions that have to be based on future
opportunities rather than past events. Innovation management is about more than just planning new products,
services, brand extensions, technological inventions or novelties. Design Thinking powers strategic
innovation.it can be used to begin at the beginning of an idea or used to unlock hidden value in existing
products, services, technologies, and assets.
Design Thinking is a way to get Business people to think like designers and designers to think like
business people. Design Thinking is the search for a magical balance between business and art, structure and
Chaos, intuition and logic, concept and execution, playfulness and formality, and control and empowerment.
Design Thinking is about cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt the process to the challenges Design
Thinking is not an experiment; it empowers and encourages to experiment. Design thinking is popular among
educators and social entrepreneurs for social innovation because it approaches problem solving from the point
of view of the end user and calls for creative solutions.
Applying Design Thinking to business problems empowers organizations and individuals within them
to better understand their competitive and operational environment. Strategy planning is predicated on the
availability of information. In the past there was not enough data to support meaningful analysis. today, it is
the opposite thanks to big data.
Big data might be helping some companies with making smarter strategic decisions, but they are also
leading those companies down the quantitative path that has made it so hard for them to design for humans in
the first place. Management tools, and techniques such as total quality management, enterprise resource
planning, six sigma, lean startup, and agile systems. These tools are valuable for keeping an enterprise
running smoothly. Companies such as Apple, Amazon.com, Netflix, Samsung, Burberry, And BMW are
winning by design and the thinking behind that design. “Management is the least efficient activity in
organization”. It can make strategic management efficient only if it makes it clearer. Sometimes, that clarity
comes only from the inside. Applied design thinking in Business problem solving incorporates mental
models, tools, processes, and techniques such as design, engineering, economics, the humanities and the
social sciences to identify, define and address business challenges in strategic planning, product development,
innovation, corporate social responsibility, and beyond.
The Ten Design Thinking principles that redefine business or business management are:
1. Action -Oriented:
● It proposes a cross-disciplinary learning-by-doing approach to problem solving.
● It allows designers to accommodate varied interests and abilities through hands-on and applied
learning experiences between individuals.
● A big part of design thinking is design doing.
3. Human-centric:
● It is always focused on the customer or end user’s needs, including unarticulated, unmet, and
unknown needs.
● Design Thinking employs various observational and listening-based research techniques to
systematically learn about the needs, tasks, steps, and milestones of a person's process.
4. Integrates foresight:
● Foresight opens up the future and invites designers to explore uncertainties.
● It encourages designers to be comfortable with working with unknowns and expects designers
to cope with inadequate information in the process of discovering and creating a tangible
outcome.
6. Promotes Empathy:
● Design Thinking encourages the use of tools to help designers communicate with people in
order to better understand their behaviors, exceptions, values, motivations and the needs that
drive them and will improve their lives.
● Designers use these insights to develop new knowledge through creative learning and
experimentation.
7. Reduces Risk:
● Whether it is developing and launching a new product or service, there are many benefits in
learning from small and smart failures.
● This will always happen, but applied design thinking practices help reduce risk by considering
all factors in the development ecosystem, including technology, the market, competitors,
customers, and supply chain.