Business design and the stages of the customer-centred design model
Innovation makes sense only if the solution has value to enough customers. Business design, as a customer-centred design model, involves four stages: initiation, investigation, integration and implementation. Let's check what they target.
The first stage of initiation involves initiating a project based on problem hypothesis, creating a project (design) brief and research plan to investigate the assumed problem.
The second stage of investigation involves investigating and validating needs associated with the problem hypothesis; researching, collecting and analyzing data; ultimately finding needs and the right problem to solve.
The third stage of integration integrates insights and ideas into prototypes, frame and reframe the problem to solve, test prototypes with external and internal stakeholders.
The fourth stage is implementation and involves designing, testing and implementing final prototypes, and then designing and delivering a solution to the problem; followed by evaluating the solution to determine if the problem is solved or not.
In my work, I find that business design helps with organizing thoughts and the search process for answers, but also with communicating the researched content, especially when there are people in the organization who did not participate in the process. When we talk about innovation, it can be hard to share new ideas with a group of outsiders. Having the information well-structured makes all the difference.
Source: Business Design Thinking and Doing, Angèle M. Beausoleil.