Reflection about design thinking tools    Challenge    I’m assistant professor at a business school in Ecuador. Producing academic content is  one of the main activities of my job at the business school. Academic content includes  research papers, case studies, and articles for local professional magazines. Academic  papers are the most challenging content because they have to pass a rigorous approval  process to get published. Publishing rates are usually below 30% and it takes at least a  year and half to publish a paper since it is conceived.     The process of publishing a paper starts with a research question, then it involves  gathering data to perform experiments or any other scientific method to test those  ideas. Next, results are wrapped up and sent to a journal for the revision process of  publication. The challenge is to come up with a process innovation that allow me to  craft a high quality paper in a shorter period of time.    Selection  Visualization is a key tool of design thinking, because it is transversal to the whole  stages of the process. It allows you to capture and make sense of the current reality of  a problem. It is helpful for sense making because it allows you to have a clearer, and  less biases representation of current reality. I was inspired by how visualization was  used for the kitchen problem. It was interesting to see how it was deployed to  understand the social reality of elder people and the staff that took care of them.  Consequently, I decided to use visualization tool because the process of writing a  paper is highly erratic, and a visual depiction of it felt like a good starting point for  understanding current reality.     Application    I started with a flow chart depicting the whole paper development process. Then, I  drew a story board to illustrate each stage of the process. Crafting the storyboard was  in initially difficult, because I did not know how to express the emotional aspects of  writing a paper. So I decided to insert word-maps about the principal emotions felt in  each stage, and illustrate how these emotions interacted with the main activities at  each stage. Then, I show the story board to three co-authors, whom I have written  papers in the past, and talk to them about the difficulties we faced in previous  projects, the things that extended the lead time of writing the papers, and the things  we could have done to prevent those delays. Finally, I also asked them to complement  the story board and add themes that I had ignored.    Insight  I learnt from these process that I saw the process as too long, whereas my team  members saw it as pretty normal. They pointed that things to be improved were in the  direction of knowing better the audience of the paper, and devising informal

mechanism to tune up the research idea earlier in the process. So the tool was useful  because it allowed me to address the problem by devising mechanisms to get early  feedback to improve the quality of the idea instead of speeding up the process.  Perhaps focusing on speed might be inaccurate, and I should focus on getting early  feedback on the ideas.    Approach    For a future project, I would use start every research quick off meeting with a story  board of how we see the paper would look like at the end. This would bring early  insight about the outcomes, time commitment, and barriers. Furthermore, I also  would empower my team mates to also draw and contribute to the story board since  the beginning. Perhaps we should draw together from scratch the story board.

