Innovation and Design Thinking

So Design Thinking… Hmm, the word sounds interesting, So what is actually Design Thinking? It is solving a problem faced by the customers by understanding their Pain Areas. This sounds great and Design Thinking has been one of the most popular approaches for building user-defined products

Design Thinking has 5 stages (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test). Going by the name it would be easy to get to think what each stage represents, so how actually to do all this. How to make a start.

There are tools or to be precise enablers available for performing this. They range from Empathy maps, Journey maps to different tools for doing ideation.

Every Overview you would see on Design Thinking talks about all this but my question is this a mandate to follow all the tools. In my personal opinion, Design Thinking is an approach to think differently and out of the box. It would be best to follow an approach that suits you the best abiding by the principles of Design Thinking

For Example… You might want to discuss this with a set of users on an issue that you will some innovation can be done, before that what is the driving factor for this design thinking, it should be user satisfaction and your passion in improvising things, sadly the driving factor nowadays is just money and growth. This can be a point to debate as many people would not agree with this thought of mine.

Design Thinking is a great technique to innovate products and improvise processes or so some innovation but I suggest is following how you want to do without being confined to tools. Follow every stage but in the way you want, this might also make to more motivated in getting things done. Please don't only focus on MONEY and GROWTH focus on the user instead.

In Empathize phase — you might want to just write down what the user needs and his feelings, fine go ahead with it, you might also feel like defining potential solutions to a problem that you foresee in this phase itself, doing this is perfectly fine. Tools and enablers are there to help but you can very well choose what is best for you.

In Ideate Phase you might want to creatively collect all the ideas in a book and even start thinking about how to build a prototype that is perfectly fine. When your work might be reviewed by experts they might come up with different improvisation points, take them into consideration and think over if that fits into what you feel like doing, if not you can very well counter back saying that this not what you were looking from a solution perspective.

Mistakes lead to innovation this is what I believe. All Designs won't get approval, that too in today’s world that looks only at MONEY and GROWTH. Only focus on what you believe , keep making changes accordingly based on your learning, you will eventually end up in your destination.

To Summarize Innovation and Design Thinking go hand in hand. Follow your own approach for every stage in design thinking, take up comments from experts positively. Don't be hell-bent on following every tool and process defined in Design Thinking. Keep innovating without demanding approval for every task. Learn from mistakes and keep the cycle going

This is what I feel about Design Thinking, main learning is how we approach a problem and how we think., sadly have seen many instances where the tools and process followed becomes a candidate more important than the actual design.

Thanks for Reading :-)

Keep Innovating, Hope this Helps