Design Thinking and Lean Startup are the most commonly used terms in both large enterprises and startups now a days. What is the difference between these two and when to use which one?. As we have seen earlier, Design Thinking is to come up with an user centric solution based on a problem. Where as Lean Startup picks up once initial solution is finalized.  In DT, we have Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test phases. And LS, we have Build, Measure and Learn steps. LS steps will

Design thinking goes beyond technology and business areas. DT is a very powerful approach for bring the innovation in social areas. Nonprofits started adopting it now. Actually, I think DT is most suited for solving social problems because here USER is the serious user who needs real help. Most importantly, most social problems can’t be solved in the conventional way because these require lot of money, effort and other complex eco system issues. So, these needs more creative, cheaper

I always get this thought about movies – Director & team works on a movie for an year or two like a secret project then in 3 hrs audience will give the verdict. Instead, can they do some “Pilot/Test” to see if the concept will gel with audience. Basically, I was thinking if Design Thinking & Lean Start up principles can be used to in film making. Just before typing the above paragraph, I just went to google and searched if any one had attempted this so far. The

In the last post, we saw we how we can use Design Thinking for designing a Life/Career (very high level though). Today, lets look at how we can use DT for writing your first & best book. Step 1: Empathize: Think & research deeply about your reader (your user). What  he/she would like to learn from this book. Most writers write a book based on what they( writer) like, not based what the readers will like. I think this is the main real factor and it not so much about luck for success

Let’s look at how we can use Design Thinking (DT) for designing your life. If we replace the “user” with “you” then I thought you can run all the 5 steps in DT to see how you can solve any problem for “you”. After I got this thought I learnt that two professors at Stanford, Bill Burnett and David Evans, teach a course called “Designing Your Life” !!. Very interesting.  Also, they have written a book called “Designing Your Life: How to Build a

As I mentioned earlier, even though the term “Design Thinking” might look like some thing related to Design but it is actual about solution based approach for solving problems. There are 5 stages in the Design Thinking process. When you hear about these stages you may feel bit bored as this looks like one more “process/methodology”. Actually, I get dead bored with the normal processes and methodologies. But what makes Design Thinking special or interesting is –

Unless you already know what design thinking is, when you hear this first time, you will get a feeling that this may some thing related to design. But Design thinking is simply a methodology to solve complex problems.  Design thinking is the latest buzz under innovation area. Unlike many other methods, I think, Design thinking is very powerful. Why?. I think this is the first time problem solving approach is mainly based on the “human centered”rather than pure KPIs, etc. In

While innovation requires different kind of minds, as always, we end up “Industrializing” everything. Now we are in the phase of “Industrializing Innovation” as well. What does this mean? This simply means come up with different means and ways of innovating by any one. Basically, trying to democratize so that everyone would be in a position to innovate. All over the world, there are many processes/methods/tools have been developed and continue to get developed to standardize innovation

Any innovation without implementation will become simply just an idea or theoretical framework.  When you get the original idea you feel “aha” movement. Later it will become “oho” moment when we get into implementation part. I am not sure how this will be in an incubation center kind of environment but in a large corporate set up and startup it will be very challenging. But in all areas one thing common is – we need to take the idea, experiment and go into

Even though many things can be standardized, “anybody can do any thing”, etc, I personally think ideation and innovation are brain driven. Some brains naturally generate ideas. We call these kind of personalities as “creative people”, “Innovators”, etc. Some people are more focused on tasks. They are naturally gifted at execution. And some other set of people are more interested in relationships/people etc. In simple terms we have three broad types of