Seriously, why are so many leaving out implementation when looking at design thinking? If you’ re not familiar with Design Thinking its a growing and trending entrepreneurial practice that can help you create and develop new ideas for services, products, or entirely new business or branches of your business. Most list design thinking as covering these main areas:
- Empathize – learning from those the have this want or need. What is their actual problem or need? How can we better empathize with them to create a solution that actually solves their issue(s).
- Define – from that empathy research we can now clearly define what the issue is and what the solution needs to include.
- Ideate – now we can start brainstorming and using ideation techniques to consider what is and isn’t possible, and how we address their specific needs.
- Prototype – starting to build examples of what’s possible. Taking those ideas from the ideation stage and ruling out those ideas that just don’t work or meet the needs of the end user.
- Test – taking those best prototypes back to the end users to get feedback. Let them use and test those prototypes and get their honest impression of our solution knowing we may need to go all the way back to defining the problem if we completing missed what the solution needs to be.
A growing number of entities and experts are including a key six step:
Implementation. Taking that best prototype and putting it out there for the end users to help solve their problem or issue.
Implementation means they’re actually doing something with this great new thing/idea that they’ve developed. I get it. Some of you are saying, Minden, implementation is a whole other issue outside of design thinking. This is the actual launching of an idea. But is it really the launch of an idea? If we’re not including this last step, how many are just stopping at testing their idea and never doing anything with it beyond that. It just sits in this endless cycle of testing that is never released to those it could impact. We’re essentially doing what we tell entrepreneurs not to do when we don’t include implementation in our design thinking process.
I’d also point out that launching is only one option that we have when looking at implementation and design thinking.
Now that we have this great idea what do we do with it? How do we use it? How does it make an impact for us and those using or teaching design thinking?
