Dr. Ben Eng is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at the Brad D. Smith Schools of Business at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia and specializes in an innovation tool called design thinking. Popular in Silicon Valley, some say it’s nothing more than applying the scientific method to business innovation, but it really comes down to understanding human needs. Ben once told me that, “Ultimately we can’t lose sight of the fact that what we are trying to do [with business] is impact people and humanity in the world around us. Design thinking really gets back to the human centered approach.” So, how does it work?
As we have learned, many entrepreneurs take huge risks by basing product or service decisions on subjective emotions. Thousands of entrepreneurs lose everything by following gut instincts not realizing they are letting emotions and contorted logic cloud their judgements. Design thinking removes much of that risk by gathering feedback from customers in a constant feedback loop. This is referred to as iteration.
The process starts by establishing what’s called deep customer empathy, which prioritizes customers’ problems over the entrepreneur’s solution. Understanding that customer demand must always come first shifts the focus from finding a market for a product to finding a product for a market.
What wild and mysterious sorcery is used to do this? Is it data driven? Does the entrepreneur need an expert in Google Analytics to create customer profiles based on their browsing history or some other form of surveillance analysis? No. Remember, this is a human centered approach so instead of reducing everyone to an algorithm, all the aspiring entrepreneur need do is simply ask people what they think. It’s not magic. It’s common sense. It’s not assumption. It’s conversation.
Most successful averagists across Middle America were using their own form of design thinking long before someone in Silicon Valley gave it a semi-cool name. In the old days, larger corporations tried to establish deep customer empathy through things like focus groups and in-person surveys. That information was then turned into statistical assumptions and used to develop products. But these tools had significant drawbacks and produced commercial travesties like New Coke and the Edsel automobile (I know, I’m showing my age). Practitioners of design thinking use one-on-one sessions that are typically done on the customers’ turf, where they are most comfortable. Using this process connects real customers to what often turn out to be simple problems that can be solved in a commercially viable way. You don’t have to create the next Facebook or iPhone to be a successful small business owner. You just need to solve a problem that people in your market want fixed. There’s no need to digitally spy on them with data analysis. Just ask them what they think.
Dr. Ben Eng of Marshall University
Okay, so once an entrepreneur has identified several problems through customer empathy sessions, she’s ready to start brainstorming solutions. At this stage there is no such thing as a bad idea. The goal is to spit-out as many solutions as possible. Most of the ideas will likely be dumb and impractical, but something useful will come out of this process. If it doesn’t, the list of problems must be revisited, and the entire process started anew. This step is called going broad to narrow. Behavioral psychologists call it divergent to convergent reasoning, and it can be frustrating. Sometimes it’s a painful decision to scrap the original idea, but in the end, it’s better than launching a crappy business and only then realizing that a huge amount of money has been wasted.
As the brainstorming process plays out, the entrepreneur must eventually settle on an idea she thinks has market viability. It should go without saying that enough people must be affected by the problem that there’s sufficient demand for a solution that is cost effective to produce. But now, instead of launching a business based on a single round of customer feedback, if the solution is a product, the entrepreneur must develop a rapid prototype and go back to potential customers to see what they think.
If developing a prototype sounds overwhelming, it’s not. Even companies like Google have used common things laying around their offices to build rapid prototypes. In one famous example, the team that designed Google’s wearable computer, Google Glass, built a functional prototype from a coat hanger, a piece of plexiglass, a Pico projector, a wire harness, and a netbook computer.[i] They put it in front of customers and based their decision to move forward on what they learned.
As one of the biggest technology companies in the world, Google could have spent millions on product development. Instead, they followed the tenets of design thinking and saved a ton of money.
The cool thing about Google’s example is that a small startup from anywhere can use the same process and develop a product or service in the same way. If the solution falls flat, the only thing lost is a relatively small amount of time and what little money it took to throw the prototype together. Before this process was formalized and accepted in the startup community it was common for entrepreneurs to spend years of their lives and all their money building products or services that no one wanted to buy. They would launch, realize how dreadfully wrong their assumptions were, and go out of business deeply in debt. Avoiding that disaster is what design thinking is all about.
By building a business from the ground up using a human-based, customer-driven approach, entrepreneurs not only avoid building products that suck, they also learn the importance of agility, adaptability, and the criticality of pivoting to meet market demands. According to Eng, “Design thinking embeds the ability to be agile and lean so that whenever anything changes in the environment, the company can change to meet that new reality. The COVID shutdowns provide great examples. Companies that were able to quickly adapt to COVID survived. The ones that didn’t had a hard time and many went out of business. Some people think that only the strongest companies survived. But that’s not true. It wasn’t the strongest, it was the most adaptable.”
A “Glasshole” in his native environment.
Now, design thinking isn’t perfect. If the entrepreneur limits their customer interviews to a very narrow demographic, they’ll get biased feedback that may send them off in the wrong direction. Google ran into this problem with its glasses. After launching, they discovered that only a fraction of the market – basically tech geeks in Silicon Valley – wanted to be seen in public wearing what amounted to nerdy eyewear from a low-budget spy movie. The only thing missing was a piece of masking tape holding the frames together. Throw in some rather questionable software applications that allowed the wearer to record people without their knowledge, and the die was cast. Wearing Google Glass in public virtually guaranteed a person would experience all sorts of social derision. In time, early adopters were called “Glassholes.” Google now markets Glass as an enterprise solution for businesses doing things like inventory control and technical repairs where access to references and dynamic information is needed. As a consumer product though, it was a disaster.
Another drawback of design thinking that is often overlooked is the entrepreneur’s passion and interests. It’s fine if we learn there is a huge demand for goat cheese in our hometown, but if the entrepreneur hates goats, cheese, farming, and animal poop, he probably isn’t going to get very excited about starting a shop on main street selling goat cheese. That’s why the entrepreneur’s passion must align with market demand. If the problems identified through the customer empathy interviews are completely divorced from the entrepreneur’s passion, skills, and capabilities, he should consider doing something else with his life.
Starting a business is a very personal thing and, as we discussed earlier, passion plays a huge part. It provides excitement and satisfaction when things are going well, and determination and perseverance when things aren’t. Connecting passion with a solution to a problem that customers want solved is the Holy Grail of business ownership.
[i] https://www.slashgear.com/google-glasses-rapid-prototype-built-in-just-two-hours-06259858/
