Page 69 - Transforming an Idea Into a Business with Design Thinking

48 ◾ Transforming an Idea Into a Business with Design Thinking

world-altering or earth-shattering, as a narrow alley in a small town. What
you need to do is to step back and stand up on the edge of a hill to have a
full view of the landscape of ideas across the entire landscape of ideas. And
then you can combine the various ideas into a solution concept that might
be worth pursuing. To do just that, have the team do the following before
generating ideas:

◾◾ Review the design challenge/problem statement. This is about the target
the user is looking to hit. (What is the job the user needs to finish?
What is the goal the user is looking to accomplish? What is the vision
the user is aspiring to realize?) See the value proposition section in
stage 3 (5.2) for details.

◾◾ Persona
◾◾ Current journey
◾◾ User’s perspectives (Figure 4.1).

Here is an example from a real-life ideation session (Figure 4.2).

4.1.1 Guidance

4.1.1.1 Session Lead

Create a large wall area to collect all ideas and review the following basic
brainstorming rules:

1. Quantity over quality. During ideation, one must never think of how
sophisticated or valuable the ideas are. The goal of ideation is to gener-
ate as many ideas as possible. Quantity matters more than the quality of
the ideas during brainstorming.

2. Defer judgment. As mentioned earlier, we tend to judge not just others but
our own ideas. We must not be judging any ideas during brainstorming.

3. Urge wild ideas. Another important aspect of brainstorming is that we
must not just be content with commonplace ideas which comply with
the norms of society, culture or technology. Instead, we must explore
ideas which are outside the norms and may even seem somewhat
wacky and nonconformist. Discussions with someone of a totally dif-
ferent context than your own would be helpful in bringing forth such
ideas. For example, if your team comprises professionals from engineer-
ing, sciences or business, talk to people in arts, music, entertainment or