Assignment - Design Thinking

Challenge:   I am a Mechanical Engineering Professor and Founder of Achievers Scientific - a very new company  formed as part of our family business. Achievers Scientific aims to develop AI products for existing  mechanical systems, predominantly renewable energy systems. We are in the preliminary stage of  our business. Since the product offerings are very new and does not have historical data and  involves many uncertain parameters, it is difficult to comprehend the strategy for my new business.  My existing expertise is with Energy Systems and I am currently engaged in learning the AI part of my  business through online courses. My main challenge is to evolve a growth strategy for my start-up  considering the unknown parameters of the unknown business environment. The sub challenges to  achieve the main challenge include (but not limited to): (a) Identifying the target market and  customers which I have to interview (b) First few projects to gain the momentum of my start-up (c)  Resources needed with investment plan and (d) plan for start and survival followed by growth. I am  in the preliminary stage of WHAT IS phase of design thinking.

Selection:   The tool I selected for my challenge is Visualisation Tool. Visualisation Tool is graphically  representing your ideas/concepts, real world design parameters and literally anything associated  with what you want to convey and make things understand first to yourself and then to others using  flow diagrams, mind maps, product sketches, pasting photos or newspaper clippings etc. (anything  graphical).   Video reference: Week1 – Visualisation tools  The reasons why I selected this tool : (a) Most of the concepts I am dealing are abstract in nature  and need some physical representations( Graphics) to comprehend (b) To establish connections  amongst the various elements while designing the business (c) To identify synergies and sub  systems/super systems by drawing Venn diagrams to name a few.

Application:   Altogether, I have drawn multitude of sketches like 2D graphical projections, product sketches,  business mind maps, Venn diagrams covering various aspects of how the business can be. Firstly ,I  used a mind map visualisation to formulate the business vision, goals ,target customers, potential  products , momentum projects to begin with. To identify the required areas of expertise, potential  markets to venture, synergies and collaborations, I used Venn Diagrams to visualise intersections  and outliers (what not to focus on). I used flowcharts for drawing the growth phases, 2D graphs to  visualize growth projections. I also sketched some products to visualise how the products can be – not necessarily product design which I can do only after digging deep through customer interviews  for potential customer preferences.

Insight:   The first thing that Visualisation helped me is in understanding of my own ideas. Most of the ideas  were cluttered in my mind and was not yielding a reasonable structured decision to go ahead. Once I  drew diagrams of the abstract and real concepts of the business, it helped me to draw some  meaningful conclusions. The next thing that visualisation tool helped me was in convincing the team  with whom I have to collaborate to build these systems. There used to be many things which I  cannot put in words but diagrams helped me to convey the ideas very well with the team.

Broadly speaking, Visualisation is a very powerful tool and businesses should not shy away thinking  that whatever they convey through words will be understood by the targeted audience. This is  particularly useful especially with the multi-cultural and multi-lingual world we are living in where  there are some serious information losses and ambiguity due to different perceptions of the same  information. Visualisation makes it very clear. On top of that, Visualisation also organises the ideas  of the employees in a more structured and understandable format thus reducing any fallacies in  communication or information losses within the organisation or team.

Approach:

I would definitely apply the same tool - Visualisation next time as well for it has given me better  understanding of the envisioned business for myself and the team. Since we were doing diagrams on  paper, it was a bit cumbersome with many emails back and forth. Instead, we might consider using  online platforms such as sketchboard.io where we can collaboratively draw diagrams in the cloud.  This will reduce time and efforts in Visualisation and is very useful if your team mates are  geographically distributed apart.

To convey to the larger audience, we may use Visualisation tool followed by Storytelling to provide  clarity in what we intend to offer and get deep insights into how our potential customers may react.  From the course, I have also realised that one tool does not fit all and we may have to use different  combinations relevant to the problem we are solving.

