| | FEBRUARY 20218In FocusBY CEO INSIGHTS TEAMHOW DESIGN THINKING CAN HELP ENTREPRENEURS GROWI n the current era, starting a new venture or establishing a business is not a big thing; the competition is getting higher, and today's entrepreneurs are very well versed with the fact that they need more than just entrepreneurship & leadership skills to stay ahead in the game. For entrepreneurs, when it comes to increasing profits, it's tempting to concentrate on making new sales or pursuing bigger accounts. But it's more important to understand that paying attention to your existing customers, no matter how small they are, is the key essential to keeping your business thriving. As an entrepreneur, it is crucial to understand the market and learn whether your product or service will be helpful to the customers or not. As someone who is starting a new business venture, you must consider the customer's needs and design your brand accordingly. Innovation is the driving force of entrepreneurship, and here comes the need to understand the significance of `Design Thinking'. Though this is a buzzword in the business world, many leaders are still not fully aware of how to utilize it to make the best results out of it. So, we decided to help them out with this article, which will focus on design thinking and how it can help entrepreneurs grow. Let's have a look.First of all, here is a short definition of design thinking - It is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, design thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods. In common words redefining problems, understanding the challenges faced by users, and coming up with an innovative solution is known as the design thinking process. Some of the world's leading brands, such as Apple, Google, Samsung and GE, have rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and design thinking is being taught at leading universities around the world, including d.school, Stanford, Harvard and MIT. Let us try to understand how design thinking can help you as an entrepreneur.Design thinking revolves around a deep interest in developing an understanding of the people for whom you're dealing with and designing the products or services. It helps in observing and developing empathy with the target user. Design thinking helps entrepreneurs in the process of questioning, such as questioning the problem, questioning the assumptions, and questioning the implications. It is extremely useful in tackling problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions and adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. It also involves ongoing experimentation such as sketching, prototyping, testing, and trying out concepts and ideas.Phases InDesign ThinkingThe design thinking process can be applied to many different contexts - it's not just about developing the next digital product. Nor is it limited to design teams; more and more businesses are using design thinking as a way to foster innovation on a companywide scale. Though organizations, entrepreneurs and leaders follow different processes, yet all variants of design thinking embody the same principles, which were first described by Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial in 1969. Let's see at the five-phase model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, which is also known as d.school. The reason behind choosing d.school's approach is
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