I believe that the workshop or sprint format could be one of the most engaging ways to connect with a business to ‘‘sell’ the concept of design thinking as a valuable tool to aid innovation in business?’

This is due in part because as they the business reps. participate in the process themselves they’re actually learning by doing.

You could base your Sprint on the Google 5 day Sprint methodology or workshop based on Ideo.org’s Human Centred Design Course to name but two toolkits that are widely and freely available.

I have experienced both as a participant and facilitator.

Human Centred Design

As a participant I first came across this approach when I undertook IDEO.org’s ‘Human Centred Design’ course.

The emphasis of the course is very much based on discovering opportunities for innovation through creative problem solving via empathy and human centric design. In IDEO’s view this is the ability to see an experience through your customers’ eyes and recognise why they do what they do.

In IDEO’s experience approaching challenges from a human perspective can yield some of the greatest opportunities for change and innovation.

So why do a Sprint?

The Sprint format offers the following to potential business participants:

• An engaging, fun and collaborative way to ‘sell’ the concept as they will be working with other individuals across different business and disciplines
• Gives your Business the option to try before they buy into the idea of using design thinking to aide innovation.
• They get first hand experience to create rapid, low cost design innovations.

To make it truly collaborative it’s important to get subject matter experts, business participants, users, designers, and creative thinkers onboard so that you have a good mix of divergent and convergent thinkers working together.

During my facilitation work on a Design Sprint at the Northumbrian Water Group Innovation Festival I found myself having to engage with people from diverse industries.

It was important to be able to draw out and tap into their individual knowledge base, level of expertise and personal experiences to share within the group.

Everyone could then contribute their insights, experience and expertise and be able take ownership of the task in hand.

If you are targeting certain industries your design challenge could be industry specific. If you want to be more open, your design challenge could be based on tackling a local social issue and therefore your SME (Subject Matter Experts could come from local organisations who are involved with this.

Design Thinking Process

During the course of the sprint/challenge they will go through the design thinking process which will involve:

DAY 1 – Understanding the problem:

Here teams discover who the users are, their needs (what they value). This involves convergent thinking: research, analysis and understanding the context of the problem,

DAY 2 – Diverge:

Teams diverge here to ideate. Anything is possible. Participants in the Design Sprint should explore all possible solutions to their user’s problems.

DAY 3 – Decide

The teams take time to review all ideas and vote for the best options. (This is nice if done as a show and tell.)

DAY 4 – Prototype

The teams create lo-fidelity prototypes based on the winning ideas without investing a lot of time, money, or resources.

DAY 5 – Validate

The teams test out their prototypes on their user groups in order to revise and reiterate their prototypes based on feedback.

Conclusion

• When done well the Workshop/Sprint event can really create a buzz and a great sense of achievement in the room as participants take ownership of their designs solutions.

• It works – start-ups and established companies use the Sprint format to bring new innovative ideas to market.
• Finally it’s an engaging, dynamic and interactive way to ‘sell’ the concept of design thinking as a valuable tool to aid innovation in business.