Design Thinking for Innovation                                                                                 Nandan Velasco

1. Challenge

During my Master Thesis in Marketing, one of my course mate (let’s call him Nandan) asked  me and 5 other students to develop an idea. The idea itself was quite broad and not  well defined, and since Nandan didn’t explain this idea to all of us simultaneously, we all  have different opinions and impressions about that. Briefly, the idea was to build a  website where students like us, or just young people, could visit and check which are  the nicest spots in the city, events and so on. Of course, we wanted to make it different  from other similar websites, and this was the main challenge. No one of us had any  particular skill but we were all diverse in our personality and mindset, so we all had  different points of view, which can help in terms of creativity but can make it slow when  it comes in taking decisions.

2. Selection

The tool we selected was Mind Mapping (of course, without knowing it). This tool looks  for patterns and insights in the data collected, and it’s especially used when it comes  to establish some criteria and assumptions for the next steps. Since our team was  formed by 7 people with different “personas”, we thought that mapping would be  better to pull together what we had in our minds in a way that we could all add some  value... some smaller idea into this project.

3. Application

Basically, everything we did was meet and brainstorm, by trying to understand how to  develop this idea in something that was different, more creative... and maybe  innovative?! We had meeting once per week and the week before we always had some  assignment like “write down from 3 to 5 column you’d like to have in the website” with  no restrictions. Then, once we met we were looking at all the different proposals.  However, the main purpose of Mind Mapping is to clarify what is not clear and to  converge all the smaller ideas into a main one. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to do  it. What we had in our mind was somehow different from each other. We didn’t find a  starting point as well as an ending one. For instance, someone believed it was better to  make it more social-based, while someone else though it would be better to make it  more informational. As I learnt from Design Thinking course, when reflection and  disagreement are involved in the process, it becomes inefficient.

4. Insight

What I understood from this experience and from what I studied in Design Thinking is  that an idea cannot simply be developed. The process from idea generation to its  development is intricate. In that team, we all had good ideas but they just didn’t fit with  each other’s. The reason why we just stopped meet after a while was that we were not  even sure what we were trying to develop anymore. When the idea is too broad and  vague, insights are way too harsh to find.

5. Approach

Now I understood that our mistake was that we didn’t start in a proper way. Before  applying any tool, we also should have clear in our mind what we and our customers  were looking for. What is the opportunity? What is the purpose of our project? What is  our plan? These basic questions didn’t have answers for us, so it’s easily understandable

that this project didn’t go in the right way. Next time instead of rushing with  brainstorms and Mind Mapping I would rather consider other ways to make the idea  more concrete. Nandan should have shown us the idea using another Design Thinking  tool, like Visualization which comes in an earlier stage and helps in making an abstract  idea more real.

Maybe we were just nobodies… or perhaps we just needed a different approach.

