Design Thinking for Business Innovation – Coursera, Jeanne M. Liedtka

Though designing as a craft requires years of dedicated education and talent to master, design thinking, as a problem solving approach, does not. In this course, we work with the following model that contains four questions and ten tools:

The four sequential questions that take us on a journey through an assessment of current reality (What is?), the envisioning of a new future (What if?), the development of some concepts for new-business opportunities (What wows?), and the testing of some of those in the marketplace (What works?). The process of design thinking begins with data gathering: at the outset of the design process, designers gather a great deal of data on the users they want to create value for. They mostly do this through ethnographic methods like experience mapping, rather than traditional methods like focus groups and surveys. Farther along in the process, designers make their new ideas concrete (in the form of prototypes) and go out and get better data from the real world in a process that is hypothesis-driven. That is, they treat their new ideas as hypotheses to be tested. They surface the assumptions underlying their hypotheses and test them – usually looking for the kind of behavioral metrics that will allow them to iterate their way to improved value propositions.

Accompanying the four questions is a set of new tools to help business people achieve the same kind of disciplined approach to innovation and growth that they bring to the rest of their business. In this course, we will look at the stories of a wide variety of organizations – major corporations like IBM, entrepreneurial start-ups like MeYouHealth, and even social service organizations like The Good Kitchen – all using the design thinking tools and approach to achieve better outcomes.

Week 2: How can we prepare ourselves to be leaders of innovation? Design thinking is not only about process and tools, however. It is about people as well – about you as a design thinker and about the people you want to create value for and with. And so, before we jump into the process of using design thinking to generate and test ideas, we want to first focus on your own mindset and look at how whether your mind is prepared to both see and to act on opportunity when it shows up in your world. We will examine this issue by looking at the stories of two very capable managers George and Geoff – and how their differing mindsets impact their ability to lead innovation and growth. We will also look at the role of visualization tools that use imagery and storytelling to bring ideas to life.

Week 3: How can you use design thinking to generate ideas? Now we will take a deeper dive into the design thinking process, looking at how we can use it to generate better ideas. This week, we will look at the story of an entrepreneur, Chris Cartter, and his start-up, MeYouHealth, as they worked with Boston design firm, Essential Design, to understand the kind of opportunity that social networking might hold for helping us to improve our health. Examining what already exists is the first step in the design thinking process. As part of assessing what is designers “follow the customer home” and explore the problems they are trying to solve in life versus their product use. Once they have thoroughly explored and looked for patterns in what is, designers look towards the future and ask what if? These two questions – what is and what if – along with the tools associated with them, will be the focus of week 3. This is the creative part of the process – but it also contains a disciplined approach. Ethnographic techniques like journey mapping help us dig deep to understand the whole customer experience. Tools like mind mapping help us make sense of the data collected. Tools like structured brainstorming and concept development help move from the creation of a mass of unrelated ideas to the construction of robust concepts that are worth moving into testing. 

Week 4: How can you use design thinking to test ideas? Having generated all these great ideas, what’s next? The design thinking process now helps us to take the many ideas we have generated, and figure out how to figure out which ones are likely to produce the specific kind of outcomes we want -whether these take the form of improved nutrition for the elderly (The Good Kitchen), healthier life style choices (MeYouHealth) or even more “hot leads” emanating from your trade shows (in the IBM example we will look at in this session). In this session, we will follow the activities of an IBM team working closely with experience marketing agency, George P. Johnson, as they develop and test ideas for a revolutionary approach to trade show participation. This process begins by asking what wows? This question brings together the customer and business cases supporting our new concepts. Typically, the “wow” zone occurs at the intersection of three criteria: somebody wants it, we can create and deliver it, and doing so has the potential to produce the outcomes we as an organization want. Then we ask what works? and conduct small experiments to test out whether our assumptions are in fact accurate. Design thinking tools like prototyping, co-creation and learning launch help us along the way.

Week 5: So what? Having now completed our review of the design thinking process, looked at some tools, and examined our own mindsets to be sure that we are prepared to lead, we turn to the question of outcomes. What kinds of changes can we expect to see coming out of the process? And moving forward, what do we need to do to capitalize on the opportunities that design thinking brings?

Anyone interested in innovation in an organizational context would benefit from this class.