Your mission as a corporate entrepreneur is to find new customer problems that your business is uniquely positioned to solve. Unlike a startup, you are not alone in this endeavor. There is a whole organization full of smart, passionate people for you to tap into. This is where Design Thinking is the corporate entrepreneur’s friend – it will grow a culture of problem solvers ready to search out the next unmet customer need and design solutions uniquely fitted to meet that need.
An entrepreneur is typically inspired to start a business when a specific consumer need is not being met.
While an established company’s core business strategy comes from the top down, their innovation strategy needs to come from the bottom up. This can be difficult for leaders to manage and for employees to navigate. It basically says that there are a different set of rules that apply to new business endeavors. However, the rules for Design Thinking do apply whether your team is solving an operational issue with your core business or developing new solutions.
How Design Thinking Works
As defined by the d.School at Stanford, Design Thinking iterates through the following steps:
- Empathize – walk a mile in your customer’s shoes through field observation and interviews
- Define – analyze customer insights and identify the problem you want to solve
- Ideate – brainstorm solutions to the customer’s problem that you can deliver
- Prototype – co-create and refine solutions with customers
- Test – test that your solution solved the problem and/or you need to shift to a deeper or more important problem to be solves
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As you can see, Design Thinking is a customer-driven approach to problem solving. It engages the minds of everyone in the organization to design solutions based on the customer problems they discover. Develop a culture of problem solving and you can use this methodology everywhere.
Now that you have a common methodology for problem solving, you still have to contend with managing core business processes that are top-down and innovation processes that are bottom up. Often times where innovation fails is when new business ideas are forced to adopt core processes that focus on operational management of well-defined solutions. In innovation, you don’t have a well-defined solution; if you use Design Thinking, you have a problem to be solved. How can the two of these mesh in one strategic framework?
Try These Tips
As with many initiatives, it depends on your organization’s appetite for risk. Here are some tips to try out:
- Create a separate skunkworks team that focuses on an innovation project. Measure their efforts not on revenue generated but by the volume of solutions tested … and discarded
- Build processes that focus on continual transparency of the innovation process rather than periodic review of solutions
- Build measures of customer impact that are used to prioritize investment in innovation. Request frequent reports of these measures to demonstrate the iterative efforts, and frequent customer engagement, of the projects.
- Only look to scale an innovation once it has demonstrated product/market fit. If the team does not have a paying customer, they don’t have a sustainable solution.
What tips do you have for using Design Thinking to clear the path for innovation in your organization? Do you work in an innovation culture?