Our clients know our passion for innovating every day in our tools and methodologies. As a result of this practice and with the desire to share experience, on 05/08/17 we held an intensive Design Thinking workshop at ISDI Madrid (leading business school in digital transformation), within its #ISDITalks format. The seminar was well received and a highly participatory atmosphere was achieved among the attendees. In this post we share the presentation and compile the main ideas created by the participants in this one and a half hour express course. The speakers were Mónica Muñoz and Francisco Gutiérrez, founding partners of The Innova Room.
Design Thinking workshop at Madrid
According to Tim Brown, creator of IDEO, Design Thinking is defined as “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible, what is viable as a business strategy and what is a market opportunity”.
For this reason, Design Thinking does not belong to the designers. We can all be Design Thinkers, without being focused in design roles, but contributing to business innovation from different angles. This methodology is applicable whenever we have to face a resolution of problems to reach strategic solutions. And it is especially interesting in environments of high complexity, high uncertainty and limited knowledge of the data.
On the other hand, the power of Design Thinking compared to other agile methodologies lies in the human approach (human centered design) and the shared creativity of the diverse profiles of the teams, which is always greater than the sum of the parts.
Presentation used as an introduction to the topic (in Spanish):
Main ideas:
– What is innovation and why is it different from creativity and/or technology.
– How Design Thinking is defined, where it comes from, and which actors it involves.
– Innovation in customer experience and service design.
– Evolution and trends in innovation methodologies and tools: Lean, Open Innovation, Agile, Canvas Business Model, Design Thinking, Customer Journey, Service Blueprint…
– Similarities and differences of Design Thinking with other agile and iterative methodologies.
– Tools used in each of the phases of Design Thinking.
Case study: repositioning a hotel
After the introduction to Design Thinking, we went on to carry out a practical exercise in teams. The challenge was: “Repositioning the (hypothetical) Hotel Sol”, and for this two consecutive exercises of generation and selection of ideas were carried out at a devilish pace. In order to increase the variation of the ideas generated, the attendees were divided into two approaches on the same challenge:
A) How to make Hotel Sol more innovative and young.
B) How to make Hotel Sol more boutique.
All photos of the workshop here. The creativity and quality of the generated proposals is remarkable. From the most elaborate to completely groundbreaking, we had the opportunity to explore a branch of possible solutions to the challenge. If we continued with the Design Thinking methodology, the ideas should be prototyped to confront them with potential users, observe the interaction and readjust the starting parameters.
A small sample is included in this post, but all the generated idea sheets can be downloaded here.
