Page 30 - Transforming an Idea Into a Business with Design Thinking

D emocratizing Entrepreneurship ◾ 9

1.5 Mind-sets for Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a process that is best practiced with the following
mind-sets (adapted from Stanford d.school*):

◾◾ Human-centered
◾◾ Mindful of process
◾◾ Culture of prototyping
◾◾ Show, don’t tell
◾◾ Radical collaboration
◾◾ Bias toward action

1.6 Creative Leadership

The importance of believing in yourself and having the confidence to
lead the creative structured process cannot be overstated throughout this
approach. To successfully go through the process, you should be open to
divergent thoughts, be comfortable with ambiguity because you’ll be mak-
ing a lot of assumptions, feel at ease at bringing diverse perspective together
and use a combination of your intuition and analytic judgment to extract
meaningful insights. A key aspect of creative leadership is to give yourself
and your team license to fail. No endeavor of any significance has been
accomplished without failure. As such, it must be considered inevitable that
you will fail numerous times in your journey before achieving success.

1.7 Best Way to Get the Best out of This Approach

Working on your idea requires focused effort. This approach will help you
remain focused through an 18-step structured process spread across four
stages that you can complete within six to twelve weeks.

1.7.1 Build a Team

You are not likely to be working alone in this endeavor, so think about
building a core team of two to five members who would be working

* http://dschool.stanford.edu/