Design Thinking Training - What changes in a B2B context?

Hello. So it's four o', clock, so I think we should kick off. Welcome, everybody.

Hello.

Welcome to this design thinking webinar. We'll guide you through the basics. So what is design thinking exactly? We'll look at a few frameworks. Actually we picked our favorite to sort of use in this webinar and then after that or as we go, we'll, you know, dig a bit deeper to see where the differences are with regards to B2B. So business to business ideas and design thinking. If in the meantime you have any questions, feel free to post these to us using the Q and A option. There's also a chat option, but that's. We're not going to use that one for the Q and A. So on the top left you'll see a settings button and then a Q and A button and that's where you can submit any questions you might have and in the end will try to go into each and every one of these. So, yeah, let's dig in. Who are we? And I'll give the word first to my colleague Wilma.

Thank you, Nick. My name is Vilma, I'm originally from Finland and I am a business designer at Board of Innovation. I have an academic background in business administration and design management and five years of professional experience in retail and brand management, HR and also process and business design. And my colleague, Nick.

Thanks. Yeah, so I'm also an innovation consultant and business designer at Board of Innovation. I started at ey, the former Ernst and Young, as a strategy consultant. I've since worked in digitization and innovation engagements and projects across telcos, banking, but also 3D printing. And besides that, I'm also in the process of launching an app in the healthcare space. So these are the experiences that we bring to the table. And we're part of Board of Innovation, which is an Antwerp based international office, so consultancy and we specialize in new business innovation and we specifically focus not necessarily on industry, not necessarily on regions, but mostly on topics. So it's our goal to make corporates innovate like startups, because we see that actually the speed of the market is defined by these startups. So we want to help bigger corporations, big companies employ these methods that, that startups are using to gain speed and then to combine it with their own resources and their own possibilities to create something we believe can be truly impactful. And one of these methods that we will be discussing today was originally coined in, I think about the 90s, late 80s of the previous century, which is of course design thinking.

All right, so Let us kick off just for those who are not quite familiar with design thinking. It is basically a set of tools and techniques to innovate products, to innovate services, to improve and come up with new products, new services, processes that are meaningful solutions. And the key here is making it very user centric, finding solutions for users. Specifically, what do we mean by innovation? It's quite a fluffy word. But what companies aim to do is they want to find innovations, they want to have that competitive edge, that competitive advantage. But in order to have an innovation happen, you have to be not only viable in a business term, feasible technically, but also you have to have a product or service that is desirable for the users. So merging these three, that's where the really, the innovation happens. That's where the sweet spot is. So when you look at companies though, what is really in control for them is what technologies they use and also what business methodologies, what marketing efforts, for instance. But what is not in direct control of them is the desirability for the users and to lower the risk to not put too much resources and effort already into choosing a technology that is useful or putting in marketing efforts. You should start with the user actually finding out what does the user want, what does the user need? And companies, they have a lot of great ideas. The problem is that they don't get the gap of actually finding out what the consumer, what the problem is for the consumer, what the need is for the user in that sense. So that gap can be closed and should be closed. And that's why design thinking is a very powerful tool to use here as an example, we want to look at, for instance, startups. Startups have a lot of great innovative ideas, but not all startups actually make it. And the reason for why they don't make it is oftentimes because they haven't validated their needs in the market. They haven't actually talked to consumers, they haven't found out what is the problem that we're solving here. Is this actually something that users are looking forward to? So wrapping it up, all in all is really. Life is too short to build something that nobody wants. You have to start looking into what is the actual problem, what does the user need here? Design thinking is actually, there's a lot of methodologies in design thinking and the creative process and design thinking is actually quite complex and fluffy. This is kind of what it would look like. So there's a lot of different methodologies that have been developed with time to make this a little bit more structured for organizations and teams and people to make use of it. So there's a few examples of methodologies and design thinking that can be used. And how we want to illustrate design thinking today is using this methodology. It's actually developed by Stanford University, by the D School in cooperation with ideo. And these are the five building blocks that make this framework. And it's very structured in the sense, but it's not supposed to be linear, it's not supposed to be a waterfall strategy and process. What it is, it is really just to help you guide through the design thinking methodologies. And what you should do is you should iterate these, you should go back, you should involve different stakeholders so that you can actually make use of each and different blocks.

Yep, exactly. And so even though, yeah, you want to take these blocks as sort of iterative processes, they're a really nice way of structuring it. So let's dive into the first block straight away. One of the big differentiators, so to say, of design thinking, which means, you know, gathering that empathy, putting the human in the center and trying to fully understand that user, that human being on the other end. So, of course there's different levels of understanding. So on the surface, you can understand what people say and what they think because it's very easily shared through interviews or, you know, any other, any other type of technique. But what's more powerful as you dig deeper, what people say isn't always what they do, or what they say they do isn't always what they actually do. And the knowledge that's underneath that, the feelings, the emotions, emotions, and the actual goals and dreams of these people will differ even more. So that's even deeper. And you see that the knowledge behind that is, you know, also ranging from the explicit on the surface to the latent. And talking about latent, we're then mentioning, you know, intuition and all of these habits that have formed over time without actually becoming more manifest. And now the techniques to sort of uncover all of these also vary. So to look at the surface, interviews sort of suffice. But if we want to dig deeper, we'll go into observating of observing, sorry, you know, immersing yourself in the position of the customer or even, you know, shadowing a person as he is sort of doing something. And all of these techniques can sort of be grouped in what we call ethnography. And ethnography is the structured study of users in their natural context. So you're really trying to be the scientist here to sort of really objectively, you know, study what users are Actually doing a very good book on how you can structure this and on some tips and tricks and some interesting tools and techniques is just enough research by Erica Hull. And she has outlined the four Ds of good ethnography. Sort of guide you along, sort of say, okay, what should you be looking out for? The first one being deep dive. So what deep dive actually means it's better to observe one customer for a whole day to sort of really grasp, what is this person doing? Why is he doing this? What are the thoughts as he or she does this? What are the emotions? Really dig deep. If something goes wrong, ask, why is this going wrong? Why is this hard for you? Sort of really dig in and then the next one, of course, being daily life. And this is the largest and most important reason why focus groups are basically irrelevant. They shouldn't be your only source of user input because they take a group of users outside of their natural context into a sterile meeting room, and it's very superficial. So you're not deep diving because 10 customers are all talking at the same time, probably all saying the same thing, to agree amongst each other, to avoid conflict, and they're out of their daily life, so they might say something else than what they're doing. Then going forward, you want to analyze the data. You want to really group whatever you have there and sort of really look into patterns and emerging, you know, motifs underneath it. So you want to combine all these interviews and observations, and what you want to look for is the drama. Where do things go wrong? Where is it hard for people? Where are things really getting painful? And that's what you want to look out for. What it also means is that you can use this drama, the pains that you've seen, to sort of sketch your story as you share later on. So if you've defined a product to sort of solve that problem, you can use that drama in your marketing message. If you want to sell your product to the top management, use that drama in the stories you tell. Now, all of this remains the same in a B2B context, but it sort of gets an extra layer because not only do you need to understand the user and the motifs or the basically the reasons why the user does what he or she does, but you need to also understand the context of his or her daily life. And the daily life of that person then means she has a role to play in a certain team. She has to follow certain processes within an organization. There are people that depend on her and there are people that she depends on. So these are all sort of extra layers that you need to take into account as well. And all of this sort of preliminary research can serve very, very useful because you're already starting to sort of build mutually beneficial relationships. A very interesting book we're quoting here called Lean B2B. It takes the lean startup methodology and sort of makes it into a cookbook with recipes for specifically B2B. So very important, A very interesting book. What I was saying, you want to build relationship with prospects as you are doing your research. And all of this then taps in to the hierarchy of needs of your end user. Because actually a user in a sort of consumer sense will think about very different things than a user in a corporate environment. The main driver for a person to do anything within a corporate culture, within his or her job, her role, is avoid risk. Will this decision get me fired? Will this decision cause someone else to blame me for something that is the main driver? Am I trusting this person enough to not be in any risk of any kind? And if you've established that you can overcome that risk, that's where you build your trust, that's where you build your relationships, then you've already crossed the first line in order to make a sale or to work together with that client. After that, if the client is convinced that the trust is there and that there's no risk in getting into business with you, she's going to want to avoid hassle. So am I easy to work with? Is it, you know, is it going to make my day easier? Basically, only after that will the person go out to look for praise, to look for a raise, compliments from the boss, or any type of power within the company can I really, you know, start climbing up in the company. And only at the very last will the person start thinking about, is this going to make my day more fun and is it going to help our company actually make profit? Of course, the profit of the company taps into the blame that people might shift towards that person. So the risk aspect, but it's really only very secondary in the process. Next to that, not only the personal drivers change, also the things that the person thinks about when making a decision, the whole decision process sort of changes. And the decision power is also spread. Quite often in very small companies, they won't be. And there will be a single CEO that takes all the decisions. But as soon as you're dealing with bigger organizations, you're going to have different types of perspectives. On the one hand, the satisfaction of your tool, of your service on a daily basis will be the main concern of the User, the person actually interacting with your service or product, then the economical buyer is the person, most likely the CFO or the procurement department that puts the money on the table and they are most interested in roi. Is this going to make us earn more? Is it going to lower our costs? And then a technical buyer sort of takes in the aspect of feasibility. Will we be able to integrate this solution, this service, into our usual way of working? So these are all very rational parts of the decision process that are quite often spread across different persons. So in order to start really understanding all of these different people, not only their personal drivers, but also the sort of decision process as a whole, you can use tools like stakeholder mapping to sort of really outline who are the people that have a sort of positive feeling towards our solution compared to, do they have the power to actually influence people? And if people are very positive and very powerful towards their own corporation, these are the people that you need to be in close contact with. You need to keep them as advocates, as gatekeepers, and you need to manage them closely. If, on the other hand, interest is very low, but their power is also very low, you shouldn't really mind about what they think. If, on the other hand, people are very interested but have low power, it's, you know, very, it could be a powerful mechanism as soon as you have a lot of them. So keep them engaged, keep them informed in a lot less closely managed way. Anyone where you mentioned where you notice that their decision power is high or their influence, either formal or informal, is high, but the interest into your product is low, that's where you need to go looking for ways. How can I satisfy them nonetheless? What needs to change for them to get on board, or how can I get in their way as least as possible, how can I just get out of their way so that they also lose the interest to oppose you? And this is, these are all the things you're going to want to look into and dig into as you try to gain empathy, as you try to gain understanding of your user and the company she works for.

Yes. So the next step in the design thinking process will be definition. And this really means that after you have created a user portfolio or you know, you have identified who you're going to be working with and who this person is or who this company, who these stakeholders, stakeholders are, you need to somehow cluster and make sense of this information. So what you want to do is you want to consolidate your findings, you want to either create user groups, you want to create stakeholder groups, you want to create Organizational groups, depending on what context you're working in, if it is really just for the end consumer or in the B2B context. So here it is also important that you identify the need that really needs to be addressed or identify a problem that needs to be solved in order for you to continue. And this means that you have to scope it for your project. You have to make sure you have an idea of this is specifically what I'm working on for this specific problem and this is how I can then continue. So a few techniques that you can use to do this is for instance Personas. And Personas means that you, for instance, cluster different user groups in terms of maybe they have a similar hobby, a passion, a preference. But you can also use this in a B2B context, saying that you have specific stakeholders that go into one team. If you have, if you work with smaller companies, you can really look at the specific individuals in those companies. If you work with bigger corporations, you really want to match out and cluster different kinds of corporations that go into the same theme so that you can find out, need to define it and then go from there further. Another tool that we're using is Customer Journey Cycles. This tool actually maps out a customer or a user user journey in that sense. So you really look at what happens before. For instance, let's look at a service, what happens when you start preparing, looking into a restaurant service, you're going to, you're going to do some research online, you're going to go to the restaurant, you're going to experience the actual service that you're engaged with and you're going to have, it's going to influence you, you're going to have an experience and it's going to resonate with you even afterwards. So you really want to look into what is this experience like, what is the journey that I'm going through as an individual or as a group of stakeholders, as a group of companies. And mapping out this, it is very important to look at also the ups and downs. You want to not only look at what is important in a good way, what is experience that is really good, but you really want to find out what are the pains that these people are going through, what are the problems that they're facing in this journey. And those are the things that you can start solving. Those are the things that you really want to identify to go to the next steps. And in a B2B context, this really means that companies that go through the process of working with different companies, they want to avoid hassle at all Costs, they want to make sure that the processes and the corporation is easy. Just like a consumer wants an interface to be easy. The companies that work together, they want the processes and the corporation to work in a simple way.

And this then taps into the hierarchy of needs that we've seen. So by making the user experience of your company, are we easy to find? Are we easy to get in touch with? Are we helping our client through their day? Basically, are we avoiding all types of hassle for them? That becomes extremely important and not necessarily user interface of your, your tool itself. If for instance, you're selling enterprise IT or solutions of some sort, it's really about the relationships that you build and the way of working that you establish. Yeah.

An example for this can be Henry Ford asking what kind of needs they have when they're saying my horse is too slow. That was their initial problem. And Henry Ford would ask questions and take a step back and actually reframing the problem and finding out what is it actually, is it really the horse that is the problem here or what is the. What is it that we're actually trying to solve here? And what he found out is it's not the horse, but it's actually the commuting, the transportation coming, going from one point to another from A to B. And the solution that was then come up with was an entirely different way of transportation. That's what he solved. And that's not the initial problem that he had. By asking the correct questions and reframing the problem, he came up with a solution that had nothing to do in a sense with horses. Another technique that we've been using is scenario planning. And this technique is really useful not only for end customers, but also in the B2B context because you can involve a lot of different stakeholders and you can edit a lot of different influences on this way. So it's not only one customer journey, but you can have different paths that go to merge together different scenarios and scenes that will influence your interaction in a B2B context with your clients and in a context in the B2C context that influences your experience from an emotional path. So this technique is very useful in both contexts.

Yeah. So all of these tools are going to help you sort of take whatever you found and all these observations that you've done, quotes that you've gathered from clients, and sort of structure them so that you can do something with them, most likely scope. Okay, what problems are we actually going to be working on and to make the decision process of the problems that you should be working on in a P2P space. Even more clear, let's look at the problems that deserve your attention. Specifically, if you can help a company either raise its revenues, lower their costs, or raise the end user satisfaction. So not the B2B client, but the B2B2C client, if there is one, those are the things that actually are going to be worthwhile investing in. If, on the other hand, whoever you're talking to just says, that's really interesting, although that might sound positive, it might not actually mean that the person is willing to invest in your solution, in your service, to use it. So let's dig in a little deeper. Let's say 60% of all question people have experienced some sort of problem. The problem that you want to tag into that actually might seem very, very positive, but what you actually want to look out for is how many of these people are actually solving that problem in some way. If they say, well, yeah, it is interesting that you could improve that, but I've never actually thought about improving it myself. So the pain that I feel on a day to day basis, even though I want to avoid hassle as much as I can, I haven't really taken the time to think about how I could solve this. So the pain isn't high enough. That's how you could sort of quantify is this pain, is this opportunity that I've identified is really there, is there money behind it and that's what you're going to do, Then you're going to look into if people are really trying to solve it in some other way. Look at what is the current spend, what is the current budget behind that problem? And then of course, follow the money, look for those problems where in a B2B context there is already a budget there. Those are the interesting areas, of course. And if there isn't really a budget towards that problem, look at, you know, the expected return. Are you freeing up any budget that could come from somewhere else and then go towards your solution? All of this, of course, to sort of look into. Okay, which of these problems, which of these patterns that we've identified should actually become our problem? Which of these should be something that we build a project around? So, and then once you've said, okay, this is what we're going to be working on, creativity starts.

Yes. So at this phase, this is really where the magic happens. This is where you can get started with your flow of creation and come up with a lot of different ideas. What you should preferably have for this session is definitely an interdisciplinary multidisciplinary team with different perspectives that will really enrich the ideation session. And also I think it's very good to have different kinds of techniques, not only using one technique to go into ideation, but using different techniques. And what it will end up doing is you will have first a divergent method. So you're really going to create a lot of different choices and then you're going to choose and navigate them down and narrow down to a few choices that are the best. And you can iterate this, do this many times, use different techniques for this so that you will not only generate a lot of different ideas with different perspectives, but you will really be able to also use these ideas to generate new ideas and to get inspired from those ideas. Another thing that we use a lot of times is trend analysis in this term. So we'll go into different trends in the future, different industries, different business models to also trigger new ideas, trigger inspirations within the different teams. A technique that we use a lot of times is hybrid brainstorming. This is an example of a hybrid brainstorming service wheel that we used in Philadelphia. And hybrid brainstorming basically means is that you first ideate by yourself, you have a specific defined problem that you are ideating for, and after that you come together and ideate together. So you can build from your own ideas, develop them, add onto them, or even maybe be inspired and create a new idea from those. It's a very good technique compared to the traditional one because you are really avoiding group think. You're really avoiding being maybe undermined by a person in your group. But you can really get your own ideas flowing first and then share them with others and build from there. Other techniques that we use is opposite thinking are also called reverse brainstorming. What it does is you will look at the problem and you will try to ideate for solutions that would least possibly work out. So you really look into the opposite section there and see what should we not do in order to solve this problem. And it'll really generate different ideas that you might not have thought of before that will actually create different solutions that will work. Another technique that we use is analogy thinking. Analogy thinking is when you use different business models or industries that might have a similar problem that they are solving in a unique way already. Let's say, for instance, you could do, we all know Airbnb. You could do an Airbnb for instruments, for instance. So you could share all kinds of different aspects. Maybe products, not necessarily a home, but you can use these as inspirations to come up with new solutions for your, for your problem or your need that you're trying to solve. And in the B2B context this makes it so much more important to co create with the clients. It is also preferable to do it in a normal design thinking ways, including all the stakeholders. But in the B2B context it is more important. You really want to make sure you are avoid. You avoid the fact that those clients were not involved in the ideation. And if you do co co ideate and come up with ideas together, they will be so much more motivated about the idea, they will be so much more inspired about that. And in the end it'll, it'll really make the success factor a lot higher for them to actually go within and follow with the next steps.

And we've actually noticed this at Board of Innovation ourselves. We started out in a much more traditional consulting approach, sort of going in, doing the whole take in intake conversation, asking the questions, taking all of this information back to our offices, ideating ourselves and then coming up with an innovation strategy for the coming 10 years, sort of saying you should dig into this and this and this and this and what. We noticed that adoption tends to be quite low, whereas now we've shifted towards a lot more interactive way of working where we sort of facilitate our clients in the ideation or business innovation process so that the innovations come from within. And if your client has the feeling that whatever your solution consists of sort of came out of their heads as well or sort of was co created with them, it's going to battle that not invented here, low adoption syndrome. And then you know, of course the final two parts of the design thinking methodology talk about prototyping and testing it and you know, going for quick validation cycles. Let me just mention I haven't seen any questions come in yet. You can already type them in the Q and A window so we can take our time to already think about them. You might probably ask very intelligent questions. So we'll need some time looking forward to them. Yeah, that'll be challenging but so yeah, keep them coming already. We'll, we'll dig into those later. But so prototyping and testing actually, why do we do this? I think the main reason here is of course minimizing risk. You want to visualize your product as soon as possible. You want to make it real as soon as possible because you're going to be able to test them with real customers. In B2B, this is often going to be about a vision. You want to share your vision. Is this what we're looking for is this the goal that we together want to reach and that's going to shift your vision is going to be created together. And that's why you prototype and iterate fast. Because that way you can just sort of come up with something, come up with an idea, a tool, a service, propose it to your clients as soon as possible to then, you know, get rejected straight away, even before you do any type of development, any type of product manufacturing. So you will learn straight away. And then again, key to design, thinking, visualization. Because not only is it going to make the solution a lot more real and less abstract, it'll make you think for yourself really a lot more concretely about what it is you're trying to offer. We've seen that quite a lot in sessions where people just go, okay, so we want to create a, an app and it's going to be a platform. And then we said, okay, yeah, great idea. You want to bring together two parties to exchange value. We've seen it a lot, it can be very successful. But what is it really going to look like? And when people then start visualizing, you have to ask yourself certain questions about how you're going to solve certain things. And with this, this type of drawing, you can then take to a client to really guide the discussion. I'm seeing a lot of questions in the meantime, so thanks, keep them coming. One final remark. If you're prototyping, for instance, an app or any type of product, don't be afraid to make it look like you've put no time in it whatsoever. Why? A prototype that is sketched on paper will invite your client or whoever it is you're proposing this solution to, to sort of break it down into pieces. Break it really, you know, basically just, it'll invite the other person to really be critical. If you're going there with like a clickable mock up on a real iPhone and you just say like, okay, you can use this one. It just hasn't had a back, a back office yet. Or apart from that, we're all functioning. The customer is quite likely or highly likely to just go, yeah, wow, looks good. Yeah. And he's not going to want to hurt your feelings. Well, actually you want your client to hurt your feelings because you want to know what this person is feeling. Also, GE is doing this to make their products real as soon as possible. They're gonna. If they have an idea for a new type of fridge for the Japanese market that needs to be a lot smaller than compared to the American market, they're going to make small validation cycles where each month they make a new fridge, bring in the customers and get the feedback as soon as possible. Why is that? It's because you want to dig into the depth of these pyramids. You don't want to know what people say or what they think about the product, but they just say, well, the fridge looks nice. You want them to really know how they're using it or you want to know what they're doing with it. So it's the same in a B2B context. You want to immediately try and give them or deliver this service for real. So in a B2B context, regardless of what you're offering or what the service or product is you're trying to come up with in the beginning, you're going to be a consultant because you are going to try and help them with the problem as soon as possible so that you immediately find out what it really is they're looking for. So even then, when you're sort of prototyping your service and not only when you're ideating about it, but when you're really implementing it, it becomes a co creative environment or co creative endeavor. So you're going to want to shift from a minimum viable product in the sense to a minimum viable vision where you build out that vision of the service or the product that you're trying to trying to come up with. You build it out together now. So those were the five steps. Let's go through them. Just in our heads, quickly. You start by gathering empathy by going out there, get out of the building. It's the famous quote, get out of the building. Go towards the daily life of your customers. Observe them. Immerse yourself in what it would feel like to use your service to get all of that knowledge. Get all of that knowledge that's deeper than what people say. It's about what they do, what they think, what they feel, what they dream. Then take all of this knowledge, structure it to define your challenge. What is the real problem or goal that our clients are trying to solve, Then ideate on that. Make creative solutions. Use creative techniques that you can also find on our website. We will share some links with you later. Use these to sort of get out of your little box. Think broadly, create choices, make some choices, create more choices, make some choices. And then again, take these back to your customer and start all over again. Test, prototype and gain more empathy. Let's take a few minutes to sort of already go through some of these questions.

What I think is also important to mention is that even though design thinking methodologies have been developed over the past tens years, like 20, 30 years in the B2B context, it's still a new field. And we're really open also to discuss and find new solutions, find new ideas, find the scope and projects and dig deeper in that also.

So I get the question here from Eveline Hestes and she asks me or us, could you give a concrete example of a project where you used this approach? Well, yes, of course we can because we're doing it every day. And personally, I'll start from the 3D printing company example where the 3D printing in question was materialized. They were very established into pretty big industries and or pretty big markets and they were trying to add a third market. So they were trying to really dig into a new customer segment that they didn't really have the knowledge about that they have on the other two segments. So what I did is I went in there as a sort of Lean consultant, Lean startup helper and I became part of their team for a couple of weeks and immediately they were working on their solution for quite a bit so that they developed this solution for already a few months, if not years, and they weren't really gaining traction in the market. So I was the one to sort of say, okay, we skipped the empathy part where we haven't tapped into the real need yet. So what did we do? We found the companies. Because it was a B2B initiative, we found the companies that they were trying to service and we called them, we asked, can we have an hour of your time? Tell me about the last time you tried to print model X, Y or Z. Tell me about the last time you did this action. Where was it hard for you? Where was it difficult? And these people weren't even using our service yet. They were just, you know, they were doing the actions that we wanted to help them with. And we noticed right off the bat that actually people didn't really feel the need to solve many of the problems they encountered along the way. Also because the 3D printing industry we were looking into was quite young. So all of these people were pretty, you know, self made and they were like, if it doesn't go too well, I'll just fix it myself and I'll just quickly, quickly find a workaround myself. And they weren't really willing to pay. So we quickly found or, you know, found out that we needed to pivot based on a not too large amount of interviews where we didn't even have to go into immersion just yet, just because we Found out soon enough that the problem wasn't big enough for people to find or to find people that were willing to pay for it. So it's not always going to lead to, you know, the most successful solutions, but at least it's going to give you rather sooner than later some pointers on whether you should or should not invest in this type of problem. Okay, let's look at some others. How do you get interview appointments on site with the users? Well, I found LinkedIn can be very powerful quite often. The thing we were doing in Philadelphia was also for a philanthropic consultancy. And actually when I looked on LinkedIn I could contact anyone within the Bill Gates foundation because I had one contact there. So anyone in Bill Gates foundation or quite a lot of people immediately sort of became a second, second, second line contact, so to say. So I'm not saying that we went straight in and did it, but could quite easily be done just get, what is it like a Premium membership on LinkedIn, for example, and you get, send them LinkedIn messages and quite often also for these 3D printing companies, when you call them up, they actually feel quite privileged that you think them important enough to, to ask them these questions and to ask them for their time, find.

Out about their opinions. And I think the experience that we've had is that sometimes it can be a big, big, I guess hinderness or people have that limitation of they think that they cannot contact their peers or the people that stakeholders that they want to work with. But it is really, it is really giving it a shot, giving it a try. For instance, using LinkedIn, calling them up, contacting them and asking and you haven't lost anything if you do that. So definitely go for it and find the time. Making an appointment, making a phone call, reaching out to those people to find out what they're actually about, what they're looking for, getting their opinions.

If you want to establish design thinking within a new innovation team, what's the best way do it? Let me see what happens. Okay, so what I could of course say is hire us. We're pretty good at doing that. But yeah, no, we have some innovation posters and what they mention is we have a strategic plan. It's called doing things again here you could actually look at your innovation team as prototype. So why not try and do some, what I might call empathy boosters. For instance, find a challenge that you want to work on and try out what it means or what it does to you or what, what is the output. If you go out of the building and contact these Customers directly. If you observe them for a while, what comes out of using that methodology? You can test that by yourself on a product you're working on to sort of build a case around this methodology. Have you found within your company for your product that it works, yes or no, to sort of quickly already find out whether this methodology would do it for you to then build a case towards the higher management on why they should or should not innovate in this way or should not invest in this type of methodology.

To get started with a new team, you definitely want to make sure you have the different steps and know what your goal is. What do you want to reach with this? Are you looking at a specific user group? Do you want to innovate a new product? Is it a whole process or an entire strategy that you want to influence with design thinking methodologies? Get familiarized with the different techniques and find techniques that you're comfortable with, that you're excited about, that you want to start using. And when you facilitate those, obviously there's people that have experience like us that can help with the facilitation and help guide the teams, make it better and then go, you know, go further from there, get that exercise, get that practice and experience to then really create that mindset also of design thinking. It's not just a practice. It really is, in the end, a mindset that you can use in product development, you can use in different processes. So starting step by step is familiarizing yourself, setting a scope for yourself, what do you want to do and then getting some help, getting some facilitators that will guide you through those different steps.

Yeah, or indeed find, especially design thinking. There's quite a lot of stuff already out there available for free online on our website or on websites of our competitors. Let's not mention those. But yeah, there is quite a lot of material, so feel free to read up and listen up or watch. A lot of these videos are really good. Okay, so I have Odette Greenberg and she asks, or he or she, sorry, asks about a customer journey. What would you define as sort of the steps in this customer journey? And how do you define, say, satisfaction? So like Vilma mentioned, the customer journey is what happens before, during or after people start using your service or product. This is no different. In B2B. How did the person you're interacting with or the person that you want to interact with, how will she find you? Are you easily searchable on Google? We spend quite a lot of effort in when you type in design thinking that you find us immediately on Google, because it's still a very important source. How does getting in touch with you, is it easy? Is it basically again easy to avoid hassle by working together with you? Is the user experience of contacting you, the fact that you're, you know, easy going, building that relationship, building that trust, all of that will tap into the before and even in the during, Am I getting the results that I wanted? Also, you know, managing the expectations there and then in the after sales, once the solution has been implemented, once the service has been executed, am I still supported in the right way? And you can really, even when the person is not using your service per se, but is using any other type of methodologies or tools to get through the entire process, you can really observe that even you can follow people as they go through that process, you can interview them about it, you can ask them questions about it to sort of look for those emotions. Where is the experience good?

Where is the experience that reflect on it together? Also, if you have you work in a B2B context, there's nothing going to tell you more about if it was satisfactory for both parties unless you really reflect and find out, okay, where does this process really go well, is there going to be a follow up, a next process, a next project that we're going to be working on together and if so, what can we do differently? What worked really well, what didn't work well and document those, take, you know, learn from those experiences and those reflection sessions.

I also got a question from. Okay, I'm not going to pronounce that name, but the question is, is this approach applicable merely for innovative projects or also to improve on existing services, solutions, products, or are there other techniques better for the second time? Well, I've heard certain sources mention that design thinking is best applicable to so called wicked problems, problems where a certain degree of creativity is necessary. Those are the problems that are really perfect for design thinking. The problems that, you know, handle with unknown unknowns. If, on the other hand, all you're trying to do is sort of eradicate all types of waste and you're just trying to get a lean process in place. Of course there are other methodologies, but that's not to say that the creativity that design thinking can bring to the table, even when looking at an internal process within your company, talk to whoever is doing that process, look at how they're doing it, perhaps even take their position for a day or two to sort of really immerse yourself in what these people is going through on a daily basis. So, so that you as A process innovator or as a process improvement within your own company, even that you get a view on where the pain points are. So even in improving an existing process, I think the creativity and the insight that this methodology offers can be very helpful.

Yeah, and I would even add that when you look at the design thinking steps and you compare it to an existing product or service that you want to improve versus a new innovation or new idea, the research and the empathy part will be a little bit different. While you have an existing product, you will really emphasize on finding out what is it that we can improve, what is the problem with this? How can we make this better versus a new one. You'll really find out what is the person that I've identified as a user? What is their problem? What need am I trying to meet? So the research part in that moment, the empathy part in that sense is going to differ a little bit, but it can most definitely be used for both ways.

I just read that Eveline Hesses says. Thanks. No problem. Okay, I see another question from seem to interchange design thinking and lean Startup. How do you see them in relationship to one another? Well, it's a really good question and there's actually a video that on YouTube as well. Design thinking and lean Startup. And to me they sort of, they, let's say they connect very handily. So for me, the biggest, you know, the biggest aspect of design thinking is the empathy gathering stage. So how do you get to the point where you get to observe the ethnographic research, let's say, of design thinking? That's for me, the very interesting part. And then of course the ideation and the problem definition techniques that go along with it. But as soon as you start prototyping and testing, Lean Startup can help you to identify which prototypes you have to make. Let me sort of rephrase that. The Lean Startup methodology says if you want to launch a product, you're going to have a business case that says if this and this and this and this happens and we launch our product, then we're going to be rich. It's your, you know, your positive business case happens. If X, Y and Z, X, Y, Z. Now what the lean startup then helps you to do is sort of look at the assumptions underlying this business case to identify which assumptions are the most risky ones. And those assumptions that are going to make or break your solution basically are the ones that deserve more research. So that's how I see design thinking and lean startups sort of linking into each other, meaning that design thinking gives you Tools to look into, to empathize with users and to sort of, you know, take all of it in and use it in your prototyping. And Lean startup gives you a more business oriented approach as to which data you should actually be going out to look for. But both, I think really complement each other very, very well. Okay, thanks. Let's look at a different question. Okay, let's press. Done. Well, what are other innovation frameworks besides design thinking? The first one I'm thinking of right now, it depends all, of course on, you know, what you want to do. There are various problem solving methods. It's the five whys technique, root cause analysis. There's a creative technique, I think, called creative problem solving. And it's actually very, very similar to design thinking. It was developed in the 70s. And what design thinking did was they took that process of going convergent, then divergent, then converging, then again. And they made that human centered. So they made sure that the as is collection of the, of the data becomes more human centered. And of course, you know, when looking at innovation, you have other frameworks that are also still very relevant, depending on what types of challenges you want to, you want to tackle. But we're big fans of the design thinking methodology and that's the one we wanted to dive into to today. Okay, let's look at maybe one or two final questions. Maybe this one's good. Yeah, go ahead.

So the question is, what would be the minimal time frame to work from start to finish? What is optimal and what is too long. And this again really depends on what you, what you are looking into and how complex the environment is that you work in. Just for ideation and getting some quick prototypes, you can really go through the process within a very long day. But optimally, I would say two days, because it is quite exhausting for the mind to be exposed to such amount of new information and to really create new ideas. So I would say minimum for a big team or for organization would be a day or two. There really isn't a maximum, I would say in those terms because you can expand those different steps for weeks. You can do empathy analysis for a few weeks if you want to. If you really want to get to know the user that you're working with, there's obviously different steps that take different kinds of time. But also if you want to make a more extensive prototype, you'll need a longer time to do that than just making sketches.

And I think I just saw another representation using the infinity symbol inside of their representation. And that to me is really good representation of the fact that it never stops. I mean, you can keep on improving your product. People will. The needs of companies keep changing over time. So it's never. I think it's never over. So what's the shortest framework from start to finish? You could work in a design sprint, go in one week and make a product. So that's probably the shortest, as you've mentioned. And then. Yeah, what's the longest? Never stop. I would say I noticed another question, and let's use that one as our last one in a B2B context. How do you overcome the problem that the customer is not willing to participate in initial open interviews? How do you make him or her willing to talk with you openly? I think the key element there is trust. Again, how can you establish this trust? It's by clearly showing that you're not one necessarily on the lookout of selling just yet. I think putting yourself in the position of really a researcher can really open a lot of doors. We've noticed it before that the same question asked by someone from the sales department or from the design department, for instance, can really make a very big difference in time that someone is willing to spend. If you clearly state that all you're trying to do is improve on a product and then they can decide whether or not to buy it, that can be a big difference. On the other hand, if you find that no one is willing to participate in initial open interviews, it might just be the case that you're not solving something they care about. If someone wants to call me and ask whether I would like to discuss my current phone bills and sort of, you know, optimize that, which I have been asked to do. They were, of course, far too salesy for me to really go into it, but it's not really a problem for me right now because it's paid by Board of Innovation. So it's not a problem that I'm currently struggling with. So I think, you know, look at it that way. Are you being too salesy, perhaps? Are you really making that openness a part of your. Your own story? And on the other hand, are you really solving a problem that's tough enough so that they really want to talk with you? Yeah. Okay, thank you. All of you will keep these questions in mind. Definitely. Even as we go further, if you have any more questions or any more things you would like to get into, Please do visit boardofinnovation.com we have a whole load of inspiration tools. What are the 200 innovations that we see over the coming hundred years. What is design thinking? How can you apply it? What are some tools? Read our blog. Why are we doing the job we're doing right now? Get into it. And of course, thank you very much. Let's stay in touch. If we didn't get the chance to answer your question right now, do not hesitate to email either one of us and we'll make sure to get back to you in a matter of seconds. Okay, cool. Thank you. And yeah, have a nice weekend, I guess.

Great weekend. Thank you.

Bye.

Bye.