Need to Level up Your Innovation? Think Like a Designer
The bottom line is that design is often mistaken as the stuff of creative misfits collaborating on art projects that couldn’t be farther from the closed-door board room meetings of the c-suite.
The growing recognition of Design Thinking is changing that.
But today’s marketer and sales professional is also facing an ever-evolving set of challenges.
Sure, we may have a more direct line of communication to our consumers than ever before— but bad news, so does every other brand, media company, and person on their social networks.
Yes, we are able to collect more targeted information about our consumers than ever before, but mining insights from the sheer enormity of the data is a whole other beast.
Technology is changing fast, people changing faster. Brand loyalty? Forget what have you done for me lately, it’s what are you going to do for me now.
Are you designing frictionless experiences?
The modern media landscape demands we design frictionless experiences that meet consumers on-demand during the infinite number of smartphone driven moments of intent that occur each day.
Innovation is a commonly discussed “magic bullet” to conquer these challenges and stay ahead in a time when business models surge and subsequently die faster than we can click, scroll, or swipe.
“If only we had the new idea, product, or process that would solve all our problems,” echoes through C-Suites.
Businesses from Lowe’s to Sephora have built innovation labs to foster the imaginations of their most “out-of-the-box” thinkers and create the business solutions of tomorrow.
And while I believe there to be infinite value in innovation, it shouldn’t exist solely in a vacuum.
Innovation lives and breathes in the creativity of each and every one of us.
Through the process of observation and iteration called Design Thinking, creativity can be unlocked by anyone to solve the problems of their business or industry.
Great human-centered design leverages both form and function to deliver its users experiences of unquestionable value. These essential elements of design should not be siloed away to creatives, but should serve as a framework that completely changes how you approach and solve critical problems in a creative manner.
When empowered by Design Thinking, the number of challenges facing today’s marketer and sales professional will be only surpassed by the number of opportunities they have to leave a giant dent in the universe.
“Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.”
– John Maeda
As former President of the globally acclaimed school Rhode Island School of Design and now Design Fellow at KPMG, John Maeda, along with a handful of other “design thinkers,” are shaping how creativity and technology are converging to shape the fabric of existence as we know it.
Tune in for my SMEI Webinar on January 13th at 2:00 ET to learn firsthand how Design Thinking can transform your brand.
By: Peter Sena, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Digital Surgeons. https://www.digitalsurgeons.com/
