How can we find answers to never-asked questions that everyone is waiting for?
Design Thinking is a customer-oriented innovation approach that aims to generate and develop creative business ideas or entire business models. Professor Mueller-Roterberg of the Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences has published a comprehensive handbook on how to design thinking, which is now available as paperback and ebook.
Mueller-Roterberg sums up the potential of Design Thinking as follows: "Design Thinking can give us answers to questions we never thought we'd have, and everyone says later: Yes, I've always waited exactly for this particular solution to this question!" The first mouse for the Macintosh computer and the first toothbrush with a wider ergonomic shaft were created after such an approach. Before any ideas are developed, Design Thinking first identifies a relevant problem, analyzes it, observes it in practice, understands it, reformulates it and only then uses this knowledge to search for customer-oriented solutions.
The Handbook of Design Thinking presents the methodological knowledge for this approach from a business perspective. Along the design thinking process there are countless tips, recommendations, checklists and tools to successfully generate business ideas and develop them into business models.
Mueller-Roterberg describes this path to an innovative business model as follows: "Think big and visionary, but start small and immediately, make the idea visual and tangible right from the start, get quickly feedback from others on your idea, fail soon and often with your ideas, learn quickly, scale fast, act sustainably and always act with integrity". Design Thinking combines interdisciplinary breadth and technical depth: it relies on the knowledge, experience and perspectives of a team from different disciplines. At the Ruhr West University, this approach is already being successfully practised in numerous projects with groups of students from various courses of study.