Design Thinking helps businesses to generate innovative ideas by discovering insights into user needs and applying these insights to their business model.

Running a business is a complex task. A business owner should meet customer needs, manage multiple stakeholders, and most importantly they need to deal with constantly changing business dynamics and with an unknown future. This is when Design Thinking can help you out to connect the dots.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is the way to understand the user’s needs and to solve their problem creatively. This human-centric process can be applied to products, services, and business design.

What is Design Thinking in Business?

A Way to Solve Business Challenges

• Design Thinking is a human-centric approach to solve business challenges of all types. Whether you’re trying to identify a new product, reduce employee turnover, or make a governmental agency more efficient, Design Thinking can help at identifying creative solutions to business challenges by putting yourself in the shoes of customers.

A Different Way of Thinking

• The Design Thinking approach itself is a different way of expressing creativity. Based on this empathetic approach, Design Thinking takes a different path toward final results and focuses on what the end-user feels after using the product/service.

David Kelley, the founder of Ideo, describes the different way of thinking this way:

• Holistic – Think big
• Uninhibited – Defer your judgments
• Collaborative – Work directly with end-users
• Iterative – Perform cheap experiments
• Visual – Create sketches, storyboards, and visual arts to express better ideas.

Human-Centered

• Design Thinking is human-centric rather than being product- or technology-centric. This mainly focuses on real users, gets their feedback, and works to empathize with their wants and needs. The result of Design Thinking maybe a new product or new technology, but it’s worth it only if the users want or need it.

How does Design Thinking work?

Design Thinking is better when you experience it rather than just knowing it!

But here you can see a brief overview of the principles, business loops of Design Thinking so that you know what to expect before you experience it for the first time.

Guiding  Principles

• Focus on Outcomes: Design Thinking focuses on what end-user wants and then delivers it to them. This is the human-centric approach.
• Persistent Reinvention: Design Thinking is a prototype i.e everything can be altered and improved based on the experience and how users react to it.
• Diverse, Empowered Teams: The ability to get a 360-degree view of the problem and incorporating the inputs from sales, operations, development, design teams help us to get better insights into innovation. All these inputs of the team are the key strength of the Design Thinking methodology.

Business Loop

• Design – Keep users at the center of the action while identifying requirements. This identifying requirement may happen through interviews, shadowing, survey, or through different thinking in which everyone from every role can record what they’ve noticed.
• Build – Come together with your Design Thinking team and look within to talk about what you’ve observed and to converge on some empathetic ideas to explore further and wow your users.
• Run: Gather meaningful feedback and maintaining a reliable solution to the trusted users. Once you get feedback from the real-world increase your fidelity and iterate on the ideas.

Benefits of  Design Thinking in Business

Design thinking is not just a trend rather should be at the core of strategy development to transform your business and to create a culture that’s focused on solving problems. This way of thinking can be applied to anything that needs to be improved.

Below are some of the benefits businesses enjoy when they use Design Thinking.

• Reduced Risk of Launching New Ideas – Design Thinking ensures that new ideas stay on a course often. This will help users to reduce the risk of launching new ideas often. 
• Innovative Solutions and Offerings – Design Thinking engages with innovative ideas, and then tests them quickly. The results can provide a far greater upside.
• Faster Pace of Learning – The Design Thinking process is designed to stage and test ideas quickly with the help of multiple people from multiple departments to generate a high quantity of ideas.
• Happier Users – Design Thinking seems to be one of the best tools to give them( users) the input about what you’re building. This helps in breaking down the wall between company leaders and end-users. When this wall goes down, amazing innovations can emerge and make your customer happy.
• More Revenue and Returns – A recent McKinsey study identified significant financial benefits, measurable outcomes, and ROI that results from a consistent Design Thinking approach to business.

Develop Creative and Design Thinking Skills

• Design Thinking has become increasingly important in organizations that help in transforming the businesses and products with their creative and design thinking skills.
• For transforming your business and products take up online education that will help you develop creative-thinking skills to innovate in your organization.

How you benefit from learning Design Thinking?

• Master the skills you need to enhance your creativity.
• Acquire the mindset that you need to develop an innovative organizational culture.
• Equip you with a learning methodology to put design thinking into action.
• Learn how to solve problems creatively with design coaches.

Design Thinking is gaining some serious traction. Many brands keep looking for ways to weave Design Thinking into their business strategies, product engineers, and business leaders keep looking for enhancing their skill and creativity through design thinking. Fortunately, for those interested, top international business schools are offering courses that aim at implementing future business strategists. Stanford School of Business is among the best to offer courses on Design Thinking. You can even enroll in these courses through Great Learning and check out the Design thinking course curriculum to understand the course formats.