How to Make Design Thinking Part of Your Startup

Learn how Startups employ design thinking to disrupt industries

Startups adopt a design thinking process from the outset. It underpins their ethos, their existence. Sometimes before they set any direction in motion.

Design thinking is a method that Entrepreneurs use to explore more ideas and iterations, faster than industry competitors, cumbersome corporations.

Here are six approaches that Startups deploy.

1. Human-Centered Approach

In addition to business and technology considerations, Startups tend to approach everything with a “human-centered design mindset” (Pink, 2012).

The most critical part of Innovation is extracting insights from human behavior, human needs, and consumer preferences.

Human-centered design is enhanced by using observational research.

This strategy captures new and even unexpected insights to produce innovative elements, more precise features that reflect what consumers want.

2. Test, Fail, Learn and Repeat

Startups create an expectation of rapid experimentation for prototyping.

The output is an MVP.

Many entrepreneurial teams even create a prototype in the first week of a project, and measure progress frequently:

1. Average time to build a prototype
2. The number of users tested for each prototype
3. Insights captured and implemented

A continuous feedback loop maintains velocity for rapid prototyping.

3. Co-Create

Startups develop an innovative ecosystem.

For example, they seek out opportunities to collaborate, co-create with suppliers, customers, partners, and consumers.

In effect, Startups crowdsource their innovation team, diluting their cost.

4. Project Variety

A portfolio of innovative projects can be enriched when big and small collide — Projects that stretch over a few weeks, for incremental improvements, to long-term revolutionary ideas.

Startups expect teams to own and drive incremental innovation at every opportunity.

This approach maintains momentum, initiating revolutionary innovation down the line, in parallel with mini-projects in the short-term.

5. Budget at Pace

A rapid prototype process is, yes, you guessed it — it's fast.

Design thinking can happen quickly, however, the route to market can be more cumbersome, unpredictable and takes time.

Startups don’t constrain the pace at which they innovate by adhering to rigid budgeting cycles or overly complex budget approval.

Startups rethink their funding approach and sources on a regular basis

They do so to ensure that project teams can continue on their journey of discovery and uncover more opportunities.

6. Scout Talent

Startups reach far and wide to uncover raw talent, graduates from interdisciplinary programs — design institutes or progressive business schools.

Also, people with conventional design backgrounds “can push solutions far beyond your expectations” (Brown, 2008).

Startups also train non-designers, those with the right type of attributes, to develop and excel in their design-thinking regardless of their roles.

Final Thoughts

At many Startups, people move roles or join a new project every 6 to 24 months — so time is an important factor.

Design projects can take time to go from ideation through to implementation.

Startups plan assignments in bite-size chunks so that designers and design thinkers leap from inspiration, ideation, implementation to execution. And do so in a matter of weeks or months.

Remember, thinking like a startup can accelerate any project or venture.

References

• Brown, T. (2008). Design Thinking. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org [Accessed 23 Feb. 2020].
• Pink, D. (2012). A whole new mind. London: MC, Marshall Cavendish.
• Stanford d.school. (2020). Stanford d.school. [online] Available at: https://dschool.stanford.edu/ [Accessed 23 Feb. 2020].