Much of the success of any business depends on the ability of its teams to understand customer needs and create innovative solutions accordingly. This premise is one of the foundations of design thinking, a creative work process that can also be applied to agribusiness.
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is defined as a work process that helps teams in any area to develop their creativity and reach innovative ideas. This model seeks to solve challenging or poorly defined problems through the construction of innovative and “out of the box” ideas. Normally, to implement it, multidisciplinary work teams are formed to contribute diverse ideas.
The features of design thinking are:
- The user is always the main pillar and the center of the project.
- The tools and forms used to seek to involve users, teams, and creators, making it a more enjoyable process and not something rigid.
- By working with multidisciplinary teams we can take advantage of everyone’s qualities creating a constructive collaboration.
- It encourages curiosity and creativity in all sectors.
- It gives space to repeat the process as many times as necessary to eliminate mistakes and explore other paths.
The phases of design thinking are:
- Empathy: the aim is to focus on the target audience to which the product or process is addressed in order to generate real value.
- Definition: all available data are gathered and hypotheses and possible solutions are created.
- Brainstorming: brainstorming begins the creative process. No answer is wrong.
- Prototype: choose the most valuable ideas and start shaping a prototype.
- Evaluation: a person outside of the design thinking team is asked to evaluate the project. This will give us an external view of the project and will allow us to make the necessary changes and adjustments.
How to apply design thinking to Agribusiness ?
In agribusiness, the creative method of design thinking can be of great help to create innovative solutions that generate value for users and our business can prosper and grow. Design thinking applied to agribusiness helps to:
- Understand the needs and preferences of users and have a better understanding of the buyer persona.
- Redesign problems from a more human and less technical perspective.
- Simplify processes and reduce steps to reach an end.
- Orient solutions to a new environment and reinvent business models when they no longer work.
- Improve user experience and optimize interactions with the product.
In our Master in International Agribusiness Management we have a module focused on innovation and product development processes where skills such as design thinking are developed.
