Business Design is a human-centered approach to innovation. It applies the principles and practices of design to help organizations create new value and new forms of competitive advantage. At its core, Business Design is the integration of customer empathy, experience design, and business strategy.
The Business Design approach to innovation aims to combine the best of design thinking and strategy. Sustainable growth comes from the development and implementation of new-to-the-world ideas, but the innovation of this kind is almost impossible without an actionable framework and tools for creative thinking.
The Three Gears of Business Design provides the framework and tools for:
- Understanding Customers: innovation begins with an unmet customer need. Customers often lack tools to articulate their own needs, and standard market research methodologies only scratch the surface.
- Generating and Testing Ideas: Turning unmet needs into innovation. This is about creating new ideas, getting customer feedback and doing rapid testing to get to a better solution.
- Connecting to Strategy: New ideas will fail to flourish if they aren’t backed by a sound strategy, including a clear set of choices of how the organization is going to win.
Business Design helps organizations explore new possibilities in very tangible ways, and ultimately make better decisions that are customer-centric, holistic, collaborative and innovative. Business Design is on the rise and business designers take juicy, creative, human-centered innovation and make it succeed out there in the real world.
Business Design is foremost a new systematic approach. It is based on articulating assumptions, testing with prototypes, iteration, and fast learning. Usually, we follow these three steps:
- Understand the market, its players, constituents, and forces; translate cross-industry best practices and articulate assumptions.
- Develop a business model prototype, evaluate it and identify the most critical assumptions.
- Test your model, learn, and iterate.
Business Design provides a perspective to entrepreneurs and managers to think creatively about their business model and develop it further. The systematic approach allows testing the viability of new ideas with few resources. In the future, business design approach will be the critical competence that decides on success in an accelerating market.