5. Creating Customer Value Through Design Thinking

It is a given that the modern world creates business challenges that can no longer be solved by traditional, linear problem solving. In these circumstances of high fluctuation and turbulence, standard solutions often fail to fulfill expectations because traditional approaches are just not made for this different type of problem. In sub-optimal circumstances we become eager to again make progress, yearning to find new ways and waves of success, to turn ever-more tough external challenges into ripe, fruitful business opportunities. In order to do so, Design Thinking becomes a powerful way for embarking on a journey of creating breakthrough new concepts. It helps us to get unstuck in times of great uncertainty and challenge, making the typically fuzzy front-end of innovation more structured and likely to be successful. The risk one has to take is that outcomes are uncertain. The reward could be coming up with radically new, disruptive, meaningful products, services or experiences that change the world for the better. Comprehensive, human-centred understanding is the starting point for any endeavour requiring creative innovation. Later, we can then better generate, prototype and test solutions for identified problems in an agile, iterative way. Linking especially to Christensen’s job to be done theory, Chap. 4 on Market Understanding and Chap. 8 on Agile, we now aim to explore how to come up with meaningful solutions to systemic, complex problems by understanding our customers and their true needs better via Design Thinking. Therefore we will now focus on one core strength and the first phase of the approach: to build meaningful relationships and communications with the relevant stakeholders (e.g. users, customers, external or internal decision makers) involved in a project context. This matters because just a holistic and deep understanding of people’s needs leads us to identify the right problems and questions to solve in the first place, and later helps us work on developing concepts in a way that will truly make a meaningful, impactful difference.