Design Thinking for Business

The book provides ways to introduce design thinking into enterprises. It provides guidelines to engage stakeholders by showing how spontaneous discussions can lead to creativity and ideas for innovation, and providing guidelines on the tools and visualizations needed to describe and build on these ideas, the kind of leadership needed in interdisciplinary teams, and the ways people at different levels of an enterprise are brought together to create holistic solutions. It distinguishes between different design spaces in particular vision, mission and project spaces and shows how choice of business building blocks for design spaces at different levels can be integrated to provide holistic solutions in wicked environments.

This book begins by identifying the increasing trend to wicked problems and the need to adopt collaborative approaches to address them. It describes the emerging methods needed to address these problems from a number of perspectives and disciplines. The emphasis is on agile development, greater emphasis on knowledge sharing and collaboration, and the facilitation needed to lead to creative business solutions. The book then provides a framework to do this by creating and supporting design thinking in businesses, social communities, government agencies or smaller groups and businesses. These enterprises may be trying to establish a competitive position in the marketplace, or create digital habitats that foster the social interaction needed to create smart communities. The goal is to create innovative solutions by providing connected design spaces where stakeholders can reach mutually acceptable decisions through continuous collaboration.

Each design space is composed of collaborative design activities that encourage the development of new ideas together with the support tools to create, document, model and evaluate solutions. Each collaborative design activity provides a canvas of building blocks to create solutions. These building blocks are put together to create a business model and record it on templates and models. The idea of a canvas is to present a visualization of all the building blocks relevant to a problem. The book provides the guidelines to divide the building blocks into levels in a systematic way to focus on levels of governance. The structure of the design space level together with the building blocks at each level is briefly described in the diagram below and outlined in detail in the book. The book provides a standard structure including:

• Guidelines for creating design spaces at vision, mission, project and business architecture levels,

• Ways to configure design spaces for small and large enterprises, including an evolutionary path for small enterprises,

• Ways to choose the building blocks for a design space appropriate to that level,

• A set of tools including templates, models, storyboards and guidelines to encourage creativity through discussions and narratives in design spaces.

The design spaces engage stakeholders, who have the responsibility to make decisions at that level. It brings together the right people at each level, empowering them with the knowledge and resources to carry out their work, and giving them the responsibility to jointly act.

The book provides the guidelines for creating building blocks and arranging them into design spaces to focus design work on particular parts of a wicked problem. Building blocks include generic blocks such as values, key requirements, partners at the vision and mission levels and follow these with roles, business processes and technology features at project levels while integrating the levels with modelling tools and templates.