AIM Archives - Tag: engineers

If you haven’t explored Design Thinking for your product development yet, I highly recommend you do. It brings seven important benefits: 1) stronger value propositions, 2) rapid customer insight, 3) improved customer engagement, 4) potential for transformational innovation, 5) less squandered R&D, 6) reduced commercial risk, and 7) the erosion of functional silos.

But if you’re a B2B company, don’t simply use Design Thinking as it’s taught in design schools. You can optimize it for B2B, especially the first two steps, “empathize” and “design”… using B2B-optimized Discovery and Preference interviews.

More in white paper, Design Thinking Optimized for B2B

Design thinking isn’t new: The concept was first introduced by Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon in his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial. It’s been “catching on” more and more in new product development circles, which is a very good thing. My favorite part is that it doesn’t start with well-defined problems, like the ones we were handed in engineering school. Rather, it’s a user-center process that encourages us to enter the customers’ world and understand it better. Especially their desired outcomes. This graphic shows the differences.

More in white paper, Design Thinking Optimized for B2B