| | MARCH 20218In the current era, starting a new venture or estab-lishing a business is not a big thing; the compe-tition 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 entrepre-neur, it is crucial to un-derstand the market and learn whether your prod-uct or service will be helpful to the customers or not. As someone who is starting a new busi-ness venture, you must consider the customer's needs and design your brand accordingly. Inno-vation 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 en-trepreneurs 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 re-define problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly ap-parent 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 meth-ods. In common words redefining problems, under-standing 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 rapid-ly adopted the design thinking approach, and design thinking is being taught at leading universities around the world, includ-ing d.school, Stanford, Harvard and MIT. Let us try to understand how design thinking can help you as an entrepreneur.Design thinking re-volves around a deep interest in developing an understanding of the people for whom you're dealing with and de-signing the products or services. It helps in ob-serving and developing empathy with the target user. Design thinking helps entrepreneurs in the process of questioning, such as questioning the problem, questioning the assump-tions, and questioning the implications. It is extremely useful in tackling problems that are ill-defined or un-known, 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 con-cepts and ideas.Phases In Design ThinkingThe design thinking process can be applied to many HOW DESIGN THINKING CAN HELP ENTREPRENEURS GROWIN FOCUSBy CEO Insights TeamIt is important to note that the five phases/stages/modes are not necessarily always se-quential. They do not have to follow any specific order and can often occur in parallel and repeat iteratively
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