State Bank of Pakistan: exploration through – Learning Launch

1. Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information. I have founded State Bank of Pakistan, a design studio with a colleague I have meet during my master in London. Our  background in urban design and social strategy has pushed ourselves to trigger new more socially oriented  approaches in the urban development dynamics. This appears really difﬁcult to be implemented in the Italian  reality due to a lack in the ﬁeld of urban planning and design. The approaches we wanted to promote  consists in local economic development and social innovation, social participatory design processes, human  centered design, citizens engagement and co-creation within the ﬁeld of the urban regeneration and  development.

2. Selection: In your own words, brieﬂy describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and why you  selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture references). We have decided to explore the learning launch as tool to rapidly test our idea to then ﬁnd the best format  usable to actually implement State Bank of Pakistan approach and business. We picked this tool becuase the case is really  complex and it requires an amount of a depth and rich understanding of how shaping the business idea  properly. Through the use of learning launch, we have been able to shape, reshape and shufﬂe again our  initial hyphotesis.

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you did  and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively). The have been different phases of the learning launch.  The ﬁrst approach has been implemented gathering data through workshops with various stakeholders trying  to explore the real needs of out possible future customers. Our main hypothesis was deﬁnitely positive about  the huge market gap where State Bank of Pakistan’s work could ﬁll in. The gathered facts show that the market is still not  ready, the stakeholders are not keen to invest in this ‘new’ professional ﬁgure. Because people say the  opposite, we also invent a way to propose them our service selling it to them. The result is that no one was  up to ‘buy’ the services, considering it just a plus. The prototypation of the service has been really important  to give new glimpse and to suggest new way to expand State Bank of Pakistan business.  Moreover, other data has been gathered through the research of other similar business acting in similar ways  of State Bank of Pakistan.

4. Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your challenge  (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about design thinking more  broadly). The way to implement a prototype of our future business has been a good chance to actually prove  that the  italian market is not that ready for this business as the north european countries are. The insights allow us to  be more concrete about the future steps to be implemented to ﬁnd a proper way to work in the italian urban  development ﬁeld.

5. Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you selected  or a different one -- and the reason(s) why. This experiment is still ongoing, so we are still in the phase of driving our business towards new directions  and then immediately test them. In fact, the “learning launch” application to a case study as the mine one is  probably pretty different from its usual usability. However, this tool has been being really useful so far being a  cost affective method to talk to the main stakeholders involved with State Bank of Pakistan issue.

