1.     What is design thinking?

Design thinking is the is a framework to design outcomes and experiences to please consumers, and thus solve problems in the world or market.  Design thinking has five stages; Understand, Ideate, Selection, Prototyping, Validation.  First you understand what problem you are trying to solve and create a team of people who can help you evaluate and collect data to develop insights and refine your design question.  Second, we Ideate and brainstorm to create ideas on how we can solve the design question.  Third we select the best idea from our iterations and refine it for feasibility and viability.  Fourth we prototype the idea and take action to begin attempting to use the idea to solve the design question.   Lastly, we validate the idea by testing our solution with various tests to gain useful data metrics and human impressions that we can then use as basis for further iterative testing to get the results we desire.    

2.     How has design thinking influenced a product I use?

Design thinking has influenced many of the products we all use daily as it is a useful framework for discovering solutions to problems in the world and the market. Design thinking has been especially useful in the automotive industry as many car manufacturers have used all the five steps of the framework to understand the customer and their problems to create a better product that helps makes their lives easier. Understanding customers and how they live helps create cars for families, tradespeople, or tech enthusiasts.  Ideation helps create new solutions for problems they may face, such as ability to clean in a family vehicle or economical gas consumption in a service fleet van.  Selection, prototyping, and validation allows manufacturers to test various ideas and put them into vehicles that become validated by creating new customer experiences and preferences. 

3.     What are the connections between opportunities and planning?

Entrepreneurs should analyze their regulatory and economic environment to develop and plan strategic responses to any potential opportunities they identify.  Developing a plan to design and implement a solution in a structured way ensuring best success in the market.  Opportunities and planning are connected because they inform each other.  Analyzing the market reveals opportunities and threats that are relevant to the idea being created.  Then a strategic plan is created outlining what activities are needed to successfully implement the idea in the market.  And then organization Is used to allocate resources and abilities for the actions needed to be executed.

4.     What opportunities have I missed?

I have missed many opportunities in the market in my own hometown.  The one that comes to mind is the missed opportunity to be the first Rage Room in my area.  A Rage Room is a room where people wear protective gear and pay to destroy various objects like televisions, or furniture with hammers or baseball bats.  The customer enjoys the physical outlet of letting there emotions out in a safe controlled environment.  Failure to plan and execute the idea to bring it to my hometown and source a location as well as products to destroy, allowed another person to seize the opportunity and enter the market and create the same business idea.  

5.     Can a successful venture be unethical?

A successful venture can absolutely be unethical.  For example, a venture that lies to customers, harms customers, or steals from customers is unethical.  Many companies have created products or services that harm customers such as vehicles with faulty design, or prescription medication with misunderstood side effects.  Some landlords have lied to customers about the safety of their rental properties and renters have been harmed in accidents.  Big tech companies have created applications that take more user data than necessary or don’t disclose the full amount of user data gained and sell that stolen data.  Businesses that practice good ethical practices are rewarded with customer loyalty and with favorable views from the consumer.  It is possible to use a ethical framework to choose ethical options to problems.  Recognizing ethical issues and seeing the potential to damage a person or group.  You should get the facts about what’s at stake.  Evaluate the options and try to choose one that does the most good.  Make a decision and test it then reflect on the outcome.