Starting A Business: Design Thinking

Think about the last time you had an idea. OK, so what did you do with it? I live my life capturing conversations and creating moments. For any business to be successful, it has to have purpose. Purpose and passion lead to the upbringing of ideas.  There is much fear from what people will think, but it can’t go anywhere if you don’t act on your idea. 

Creativity, Dedication, and Passion

Creativity is something that is not given, it is taking the time out of the day to question what is around you; to see the other side of life, and to see how others act around you. Creativity inspires you to live life with questions, where you want to gain perspective and reach your fullest potential. For any business, creativity will differentiate you. Live to create, drive to inspire.

Dedication comes from how much you care about your idea and the reasoning you keep pursuing. Dedication starts by waking up early and being motivated through every action of the day. When you think you’re starting to get tired, set a different objective and go after it. Being able to create and set forth with an idea is hard and few do so; but in order to be successful, dedication is the difference maker between an idea and a business.

Passion is described as something that makes you motivated or what you love to do. Passion gives you energy from unexpected unknowns. For me, my passion is helping others. Finding and understanding your passions gives you purpose in life, and a deeper meaning of how life should be lived. In terms of business, pursuing an idea with passion can only ignite the idea and the people around you. Not giving up and continuing your passion makes you only grow stronger.

It’s A Process

The process of the design above, represents how design thinking is meant to be messy, and by the end, a way of clarity. According to Tim Brown CEO, IDEO: “Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” This process will help you think about your idea in a broader sense; where empathy plays a vital role in the curation of any idea. 

The Process is Deeply Human: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation

The approach starts with understanding users through empathy interviews to understand what human needs there are. From this, you can see clearly what the problem is and define it in a way that can produce a result. Ideate is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. In other words, it represents thinking about all the possibilities in terms of concepts and outcomes. The ideate phase is important where it is designed to come up with as many ideas possible. There is no judging on any idea, where good ideas will rise to the top and bad ones will drop off early. It is important to have an open mind, where it is OK to face failure. After collecting ideas, you match what can best parlay to the insights gained prior in the empathy interviews. A prototype helps to gather feedback and improve any idea. Prototypes help speed up the process of innovation because it allows you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the new solution. Once the prototype is created, testing it is important because you will see how it will work. Further, the earlier the feedback, the lower the cost for any organization as well as higher levels of adaption of the solution to the customer needs. 

What if it Fails? 

How can you even define failure? Sure, you can go bankrupt, or the business doesn’t work; but that is an experience that you can grow from. I like to say that there is no such thing as failing, it’s just learning in a different direction. I believe that failing comes down to your purpose and your goal for any business. Defining the purpose of the business helps to clearly identify what steps to take or what may be lacking in the business. If all else fails, you will be learning.

Stresses to Ideas

Life is full of stresses. If you didn’t know that by now, then you’re not living. Think about the energy you had the last time you were stressed, and what was your outlet? For me, I create when I am stressed. Whether that is writing ideas, drawing, painting, or just thinking about what is happening in the present moment. Stresses come and go, but how you act on it differentiates you in many ways… think about it.