What do you mean by Design Thinking Business Strategy?

   
 
        Design thinking is a great framework for synthesizing the collective expertise to develop a realistic solution and focuses on end-user engagement. It is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving the problems. The problems can be the human needs, human-centric problem framing, creative brainstorming and prototyping into testing. It is unique compared to other problem-solving and non-linear process focused on outcome and delivery. There are 2 modes of thinking,
   *  Divergent Thinking
   *  Convergent Thinking
            Divergent thinking refers to many possible solutions to the given problems or issues. It is demonstrated in the idealization phase. Convergent Thinking is coming up with the single best solutions to the given problem. Design Thinking has a strong focus on human-centric solutions for understanding customer motivation and empathy. It minimizes the risk of uncertainty and failures. In the Wicked problem, the solutions working in this market today may not be working tomorrow in that market. These problems are common in the business environment. Climate Change is a great example of wicket problems. So, When thinking about business solutions to respond to climate change, it is essential to use design thinking principles. This will enable the business to build consensus around clarifying the problems and solutions.

Prototyping: It is critical to test early and often to spend time and money getting something that no one wants in the market first place. To kick it off, you need to know the prototype. Prototyping is all about the representation of your solution to test and play around the solution. It is not necessarily functional. But, it does generate much feedback and validate from your user assumptions. It is focused to develop on usability and tests the solution that actually makes the need and identify the problem definition statement. It is usually developed to validates the assumption before the Minimum Viable Product(MVP). There are high fidelity and low fidelity prototypes. High fidelity is a realistic example of the end product and the user can interact with whereas low fidelity prototypes are a visual representation of the end product.

 Product Ideation: Ideation is part of the design strategy framework. It is to come up with an inspirational problem definition statement and synthesize the ideas to innovative practical solutions in advance. The ideation process is generating the ideas and form the roadmap to address the problem definition statement. Ideation occurs before developing the MVP. Each ideation process is likely its own prototype or modified prototype. A prototype is designed for the feasibility of the solution or part of the solution. It focuses on end-user need. Ideation requires participants purposefully engage some specific behaviors and characteristics. For ex, you may need to think barriers and obstacles as opportunities or explore the new experiences and put yourself out of your comfort zone to learn something new or visualize a new way to turn the abstract ideas into real and achievable possibilities etc.,
    Ideation process can be grouped as follows,
     - Problem to Solution: This is common form of ideation. It is simply to identify the problem and matching the logical solution.
     - Revolutionary: It is taking the existing idea or solution to a completely new perspective framework
     - Derivation: It is more adapting to the existing solution of an existing problem. But, improving the solution.
     - Targeted Discovery: It is deliberate and iterative process when solution is clear, but a pathway to achieving the solution is unclear.
     - Serendipitous Discovery: It is when you have an unintended solution into one problem was searching a solution to the other problem.
    - Artistic Innovation: It completely disregards all manner of practicality and innovate and iterate without constraints or boundaries.   

Minimum Viable Product(MVP): MVP is the most basic and rudimentary version of the product or service. It is an effective version of idea with minimum functionality in order to test your hypothesis. Prototype is a tool to test the feasibility of your entire or part of the solution and it is not market-ready and adopted the early adopters. MVP has the valuable purpose that people who purchase the product and services. Also, you can retain the early adopters. MVP uses the early adopters to gain product feedback and add additional features in a modular manner until you reach a full product offering. The types of MVPs are,
   * Wireframes
   * Mockups
   * Explainer Videos
   * Landing Pages
   Wireframes are visual outlines of your products. They generally used to articulate the idea like layouts, navigational systems. But, it does not include color or significant design work. Mockups are an extension of the wireframe. It may be basic branding or colors added that are more interactive. Explainer videos are the ones to show on how the solutions work. The idea behind the solutions and the benefits of the solutions to the users. It is a cost-effective way of getting your potential customers, users, consumers, and stakeholders. Landing Page is the website placeholder that can inform people about your solution. It contains the product and services of the key benefits and features. You can use a landing page to host your Explainer Videos or Mockups too.

Scope of MVP: Before committing to the development of MVP, you need to work out for what you want in the product like the product features, importance of each feature etc., It is the feature set of your product and need to prioritize for the Must-have features. Also, you need to decide on what type of MVP to create in order to test these key features.

Design Strategy: It is the term used to describe the mix between corporate strategy and design thinking. Design thinking is a solution-based approach to solving problems by engaging end-users. It is a process or approach that can be applied to many different circumstances and used to create a product. There are 5 steps in design thinking. Those are
1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Testing
Often, people and organizations apply these principles to develop the product. The important element of the corporate strategy is to create the request for the feedback from the customer. It is how the executive get to understand what the customer really experience in order to communicate directly and authentically?

Design Strategy Framework: The business model canvas is the globally recognized tool for developing a new business model for segmenting and understanding the existing business. This visual tool allows the firm to segment as input, output, and stakeholders. It converts the boring business plan to one-page overview and explores the key elements of the business.

Business Model canvas comprises of 9 sections of boxes. It can be described business as a whole, or business strategic plan, or the specific product the firm is trying to sell. So, you should methodologically fill in the boxes that are relevant to the strategic plan or product that you want to segment. The key partners are the 3rd party people in order to deliver value to the customer or solutions. It is to think about you need to work with to deliver the solutions.  Key Activities are the actions that you must take to deliver value to the customer. So, what activities do you need to undertake to deliver value? Do you need to develop a new product or service? Key Resources are the things that your organizations need in order to deliver value to the customer. What physical (ex, equipment, infrastructure, tools, materials), non-physical(ex, technology, people, customer relation distribution channel)resources do you need to deliver value? Value Propositions is the benefit that you are going to deliver to your customers and the pain points that you are going to resolve. It could be qualitative like improving the customer experience or quantitative like process optimization, time-savings etc., Customer Relationships is the relationships that you want to have with your customer, what the customer expects of you and costs (ex. marketing, distribution etc., )associated with the relationships. Actually, the customer(ex, user, employee) will be internal to your organization. Channels are the way to service your customer. So, you may have different channels and map each channel with the appropriate segment. Different products and services appeal to different customers. In order to run the business effectively, you must understand the Customer Segments that your products and services appeal to. There are many ways organizations generate Revenue. For instance, they can charge a one-off fee for products or services, monthly or annual subscriptions, commissions etc., The Revenue Generation depends on the customer segments that you are servicing. Their needs and preferences in areas of business. All businesses incur a Cost to deliver value. In order for the business to be profitable, it must cost more than generating value. Businesses can be Cost-Driven where the organizations focus on reducing the cost as much as possible or Value-Driven where firms focused on delivering the value.
      Using the business model canvas, you can understand the organization strategic plan and parts of the organization fit together and deliver value to the customer segments. You can set your company's strategy to address this gap and design strategy to generate effective solutions around it.

Corporate Strategy: It is a method that businesses and similar entities used to identify a plan and achieve long-term objectives or goals. It includes different modes and strategies. There are some important components of corporate strategy. Those are,
   * Risk Management
   * Financial Strategy
   * People & Culture
   * Customer Acquisition & Sales
     There is a level of risk with every business decisions are made and many risks in business space like opportunity risk, uncertainty risk, and hazard risk. Risk management Strategy identifies and mitigates the known risk. The corporate financial strategy includes the historical review of entities financial position like balance sheet, income statement, cash flow, and financial projections. People and culture strategy includes the road map to the desired workplace culture. Remember, you need a great team to build a great product &Services. The Customer Acquisition strategy is the stronger alignment to marketing and communications. It is ultimately bring the sales through brand recognition, community identity or website traffic etc.,
     Integrated strategic planning is the methodology that suggests each of the corporate planning developed in a collaborative manner and each document should be live, but not simply updated. It recommends the planning process to be an outward focus that includes stakeholders, partners, customers.


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