Design thinking: what it can do for your business

Martin Sawbridge, partner at DesignThinkers Group New Zealand, explains the concept of design thinking, along with the benefits for SMEs and how to get started.

NZB. What exactly is Design Thinking?

Martin: Design Thinking is fundamentally a human centred approach to understanding customers’ deep needs. At the start of the process is empathy, which seeks to find out what is desirable from a human perspective. The process then explores what is technologically feasible and economically viable.

Design Thinking also helps to gain a clear understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve; being open to exploring as wide a realm of ideas as possible so that businesses can design desirable and often innovative products and services for their customers.

There are various Design Thinking processes in use today, but they all commonly embody the same process, namely: Empathy; Define; Ideate; Prototype; Test; Iterate.

NZB. What are the key benefits?

Martin: The Design Thinking process is very useful in tackling problems that are ill-defined or unknown as it is action-oriented and a problem-solving strategy. It also helps teams break away from the normal or traditional way of problem solving which is generally based on accumulated knowledge.

The primary focus of Design Thinking is to unlock what customers value most. The empathy phase pushes aside our own assumptions of what customers want which ultimately delivers on innovative and meaningful solutions based on customer insights. Gaining a deep understanding of your customers’ needs also helps businesses build a key competitive advantage.

NZB: Is Design Thinking a new thing?

Martin: This process has been successfully used by the creative and design industries since the mid-60s. It’s a methodology that designers use to solve complex problems and find desirable solutions. It revolves around a deep interest in developing an understanding of the people for whom they’re designing for. In more recent times, Product and UX Designers have explored in more depth what user needs are and how they interact with products they are designing.

The business world, however, first cottoned on to the practice when they were searching for alternatives to the standard approach in the early 2000s. The good news is, you don’t need to be a designer to practice Design Thinking. It allows anyone to use creative tools to address a wide range of problems and challenges.

NZB: Is it something that only big companies can adopt, or can it apply to SME’s as well?

Martin: Anyone can adopt the Design Thinking process. The process itself can be applied to any project from small personal ones to larger complex problems.

NZB: Given that most SMEs are time poor how would you suggest they start?

Martin: Start small, don’t try and solve the world’s problems in one hit. We encourage businesses, no matter their size, to break down projects to bite size junks. Design Thinking in its nature is rapid. Projects may run over a few hours or a period of a few days depending on the urgency, budget and size of each project.

To save time, at the start of any Design Thinking project, have the problem or challenge you are addressing as well defined as you possibly can, gaining good customer insights is key to this.

NZB: For those who are interested in Design Thinking, where is the best place to start?

Martin: There’s a lot of information out there on Design Thinking. As a start we would suggest reading some articles from respected practitioners such as Tim Brown or David Kelley from an agency in the US called IDEO. Or, we encourage people to get in touch with us for a coffee and a chat and we can help them on their way to better understanding Design Thinking or help them run their own Design Thinking projects!

Support NZBusiness to provide quality Nz Business journalism CLICK HERE