Design Thinking for Innovation

Reflection

1. Challenge: To expand the distribution of Indian Sindhi papad, globally, to the areas

where the Indian diaspora lives.

A papad basically is a crisp, round flatbread from India. It is typically based on a  seasoned dough usually made from peeled black gram flour, either fried or cooked  with dry heat. And Sindhis are an ethno-linguistic group who speak the Sindhi  language. After the partition of India, most of them migrated to other parts of the  world. And Sindhi papad has a unique taste of its own. But it is usually restricted to  some of the Indian cities itself. Not everyone has the access to have the food items  in their households, especially those who stay thousands of kilometres away from  India.

2. Selection: The tool I’ve selected is Learning Launch. I selected it for the challenge

because I’ve never approached this idea much in the exercises. Also, I mostly liked the  approach of having an initial ‘hypothesis’. Learning Launch process is basically an idea  generating tool which includes a rough idea, a specific group of persons, who have a  specific need, the idea that meets the need, and which might turn out to be better than  the current alternatives. This overall creates a hypothesis. An appropriate video lecture  reference for this could be the one which was there in the course itself, “Learning Launch  Tool”, in week 4.

3. Application: First, I pondered upon an idea for which there might be a need for a certain

section of people. For instance, here, it is the Sindhi diaspora’s need for having their  traditional Sindhi food item for themselves. Although, there might be several ways to  order Sindhi papad online, they are usually expensive due to the shipping charges. Here,  I am mostly highlighting on the alternative of having a collaboration or a joint venture with  further international organizations and to build a franchise. Although there could be a  probability of the tool being partially effective.

4. Insight: To be frank, I’m only at a nascent stage of the challenge. From this conception,

to the actual establishment of the products inside the global supermarkets and grocery  stores, it’ll require several other aspects like market research, demographic research and  furthermore aspects. Also, as the professor in the video said, that the idea can also be  inserted in the ‘trash bin’, that is, it might be used not now but later, when it’s need  becomes quite pertinent.

5. Approach: Next time, or rather, whenever I’ll brainstorm more with this idea, I shall apply

the storytelling tool. The reason being that there actually have been several fact-based  stories in which Sindhi papad has been appreciated across several groups of people,  especially in India. For more, you can look-up this link:  https://alvarado.com/categoriesindex.html

