Page 42 - Transforming an Idea Into a Business with Design Thinking

The Three Stages Plus One ◾ 21

In stage 1, you’ll develop a deep understanding of the stakeholders relevant
for your idea and do user research to develop personas and capture their
current journey. This will allow you to develop an insightful point of view
for the key stakeholder or stakeholders who have a problem that your idea
intends to solve.

Stage 2 will walk you through the ideation techniques, building future
experience vision, prototypes and testing of your prototypes with key
stakeholders. You’ll be able to recognize the importance of not being emo-
tionally tied to the first idea you had for a solution and of listening to the
customer and testing your ideas without investing too much of your time
and resources in finalizing the solution offering. This will also help you
understand the use cases for which the solution will be beneficial for the
stakeholders as well as recognize dependencies of the future experience on
existing processes, in case the solution is geared toward enterprises.

In stage 3, you’ll convert your use cases into a value proposition and
have a better understanding of the complexities involved in converting an
idea into a business model in a complex world full of competitors and other
trends that have an impact on how you go to market with your solution.
These complexities include financial implications, resources, activities and
partnerships needed and channel to reach customers.

Finally, throughout the above three stages, you and your team must be
documenting all the assumptions you are making, which will help you have
an honest insight into the uncertainty inherent in your venture. In this stage,
you’ll be able to manage risk as you pursue your endeavor.

It is important to highlight at this stage, as indicated in the circular Venn
diagrammatic depiction of the framework, that as you work through this
framework, you will be going back and forth between the various steps of
the framework. When you are focusing on one stage, you may follow the
steps therein sequentially. However, you should feel open to jumping to a
different stage and step to brainstorm and come back to the step you were
working on afterward. The sequence of the framework is provided to guide
your thinking primarily and should not be considered as a step-by-step pro-
cess that has to be followed strictly.