Let's now spend some time talking about design strategy, because it's quite a new subject that blends two areas, design thinking and corporate strategy. In this lesson, we're going to look at what design thinking is, and discuss how corporate strategy and design thinking a distinct from design strategy. Finally, we'll explore how design strategy can be used as a vehicle to communicate corporate strategy. Design Strategy is the term used to describe the nexus between corporate strategy and design thinking. Corporate strategy is the traditional method that businesses and other similar entities used to identify, plan, and achieve their long term objectives and goals. Design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems by engaging end users. To unpack this a little more, design thinking is a process or an approach that can be applied to many different circumstances, but is often used to create new products. There are five main steps, empathizing, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, and testing. Now, these steps don't necessarily have to be done in a strict order, and you may repeat some steps more than others. Often, people and organizations have applied these principles of design thinking to develop new products. The methodology has become a bit of a hit amongst entrepreneurs in the startup scene too as a way to rapidly develop new technologies, and products for instance. While we'll certainly look at design thinking in more general terms throughout the course, what if we took the foundations of design thinking, and applied them to more than just creating innovative new products. What if we explored how it could revolutionize the way we sit and communicate company strategies? What are the problems that businesses of all kind's face? What incredible innovations could that lead to? Enter design strategy. Design strategy is a concept that has been developed to describe a particular way of doing corporate strategy. It is a corporate strategy, or elements of a corporate strategy, created through close dialogue and continuous feedback with customers, and end users on the front line. In other words, its corporate strategy taken outside of the boardroom. Our vision of design strategy uses certain elements of design thinking principles. This shapes the kind of end user engagement that strategy makers need to do to ensure that an effective company strategy delivers. Design strategy is a framework approach to strategy formulation that can be used to link the often disparate elements of a corporate strategy. Design strategists, the people who practice design strategy, are at the crossroads of design, business strategy, and innovation. Let's pause for a moment and briefly discuss the language of strategy, as this will help to frame a conceptual understanding of design strategy. Once an organization has settled on a corporate strategy which can often take months to complete, business leaders are then tasked with communicating that corporate strategy to stakeholders and ensuring that that strategy is put into action. Stakeholders might include employees, suppliers, shareholders, and business partners. They kind of represent a wide range of people who have different levels of understanding about a firm's goals, and objectives, and how to achieve them. Also the Lexicon used to communicate strategy, isn't easy to get right. Often, many experienced business leaders fail to effectively communicate their strategic vision, which ultimately means that the success of the corporate strategy suffers. Why is this? A lot of difficulty in communicating corporate strategy can be attributed to something called information asymmetry. This is essentially when one party has a deeper understanding, or knows more about something than the other party. Also, the boardroom process is often top-down, initiated by senior leaders who are a long way from the frontline experienced by the customers and end-users. So, how do executives get to understand what their customers really experience in order to communicate with them directly and authentically. Design strategy is one tool that senior managers, for instance, can deploy to combat information asymmetry and get bottom up information into their strategic decision making. Corporate strategies are often very detailed documents, encompassing the many different facets of a firm. By nature, people like information that is visually and tangibly expressed. Put simply, if people can see the corporate strategy, then they are much more likely to understand it. Design Strategy takes this philosophy one step further allowing business leaders to build their corporate strategy into something that can be tangibly engaged with, and tested by employees, customers, and other stakeholders. There are many ways that this can be done. Here's one example. Imagine you ran your own business and after reviewing the main elements of your business during your quarterly strategy meeting, you identified that there was a gap in how the company manages its customer relationships. So, you invested a lot of time and money in some Customer Relationship Management Software, CRM, but your staff aren't using it. As a result, customer information is getting lost and your customers are becoming frustrated. Sales are going down. Well, how can you use design strategy to come up with a way to better engage your staff with the CRM? Design strategy and its foundation in design thinking which focuses on uses, can help create innovative solution beyond that of a boring use of guide that you probably would have come up with. You can think about using gamification, interactive learning, virtual training simulations, and other nobel approaches to training. The sky's the limit. The most important thing is to remember design strategy has its foundations in engaging your users. So, talk with your staff and find out why they haven't engaged. How would they like to engage and respond to that information. Using design strategy, you can embed design deeply within your corporate strategy, and allow stakeholders to better connect with your corporate strategy. Your organization strategy is no longer something that sits there in the top drawers of the same weight, but becomes truly embedded across all levels of an organization, and its stakeholders. To conclude, design strategy is the term used to describe a corporate strategy, or elements of a corporate strategy that communicated, created, or executed using design thinking principles. So, that's a lot to digest, but you should now be able to explain, how corporate strategy and design thinking are distinct from design strategy. As well as understand the basic concept of design strategy, and how it can be used as a vehicle to communicate corporate strategy. To fully understand the design strategy process, it's important to also fully understand the design thinking process, as well as the main elements of a business. So, we will spend time over the rest of the course, looking at the various steps and how they can be applied not only to products or services, but also how that can be applied in a strategic manner just as we have described. We'll also look at the Business Model Canvas, which is a great tool to assess the main components of the business and how they fit together. And once you've got all these elements all put together, you'll be truly ready to put design strategy into practice. If you would like to know more about the origins of design thinking and design strategy, then we've made additional resources available in the reading list for this module.
