Think, Innovate, Create & Disrupt with "Design Thinking"

Ever wondered why some brands go on to become icons while most others never make the journey from “Good” to “Great”?  If you take a close look at the most successful brands across categories, you will spot a common character – it’s called Empathy – empathy for the consumer or the end user of the product or service. You won’t necessarily find brands with maximum number of “features” at the top. In that list, you are more likely to see brands that addressed “real” consumer needs better than the others.

The early 2000’s saw the launch of a slew of tiny portable music players. Most came from the most reputed companies around. Some boasted of the smallest, slimmest form factor, some had the coolest colors while others offered great audio fidelity. But no one addressed a very critical and very real need of the consumer - When you were at song number 300, going back to song number 21 was a big pain as the songs were organized in random disarray !

And then something happened which disrupted the entire portable music player market. Along came the iPod. The makers of the iPoD had focused on that one real need and figured out a way to help keep the music cleanly categorized. They introduced the intuitive track pad which revolutionized and simplified the way users accessed music. They put their music on their fingertips and allowed them organize it the way they wanted. The iPod was the simplest and the most intelligent solution to a seemingly unfathomable challenge thus far !

So how did they figure it all out?

In a culture, where a bunch of insiders unilaterally decided what they believed customers' needed and created products based on that, this company brought the human factor back to the table. They created a culture of getting into the shoes of the users of their products and made that the blueprint of the final product.

This philosophy of keeping the end user at the centre of the process when finding solutions, has come to be known as Design Thinking. The origins of Design Thinking can be traced to Stanford university and it was later adopted and popularized by a design consulting firm called IDEO. In recent times, it has found widespread adoption as organizations are using the methodology, not just for designing better products, but also for solving a wide range of challenges – from business strategy, supply chain systems and retail to social engineering and even town planning !

 Since 2007, SAP has been at the forefront of the Design Thinking revolution when its co-founder, Hasso Plattner hired thirty-five design thinkers to be part of SAP’s strategy team. Design Thinking has since been used to reshape SAP and has become a strategic priority leading to to the creation of two centers of excellence, namely the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany and the D-School at Stanford, which are now globally recognized as the best centers of their kind.

SAP not only imbibed the values of Design Thinking, its is taking it to their customer organizations in India, helping them adopt this revolutionary methodology to find simple, creative solutions to their most critical  challenges.

As part of this initiative, we conducted a Design Thinking workshop at New Delhi on September 18, on the sidelines of The Futurist CMO 2013 Conference. This workshop was attended by Chief Marketing officers and senior marketing leaders from 18 leading companies. This engaging two hour workshop exposed them to the methodology and principles of Design Thinking and feedback received was overwhelming.

The next in the series of these workshops is scheduled at Mumbai as part of the World Brand Congress 2013 event. For more details please follow the link below and feel free to join us for an exciting session of Design Thinking for marketers.

World Brand Congress 2013

http://www.worldbrandcongress.com/

21-23 October, 2013

The Taj Landsend, Mumbai

Bye for now and keep watching this space for more !