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Common Problems Startups Face – A design thinking outlook

Common problems startups face – A Design thinking outlook I have been directly associated with startups since 2006. That’s when I started my career as a member of a venture capital investment team. All the way to my recent years consulting them and young businesses, I have heard a multitude of problems that startups face….

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Killer Design

Killer Design What comes to mind when you think of possible consequences of bad design? Of a badly designed product or service? You might think the product generates less revenues. Or a rise in the number of product returns, and unhappy, angry or disappointed customers. Right? But what about death? Of animals? Or worse, death…

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The Mortal Risk of Riding Shotgun in an Autonomous Vehicle

The Mortal Risk of Riding Shotgun in an Autonomous Vehicle We live in strange times. And in interesting and amusing times. A recent article I read, spoke about how most automotive manufacturers are misleading (or are confused themselves), when they claim to offer autonomous driving features in their vehicles. Their mindset seems hugely flawed, if…

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What Qualifies as True Innovation?

What qualifies as true innovation? The word ‘innovation’ does get passed around a lot nowadays. From large businesses to startups and perhaps even consultants like myself. If you take a moment to think about it, innovation is not as commonplace as we might assume it is. If you had an almost infinite budget, and you…

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Anti-Crime Balls

Anti-crime colour balls Imagine you are a store manager, and a masked thief has you at gun or knife-point, asking you to empty the cash into his or her bag. How would you recognize the thief outside in a crowd of people? Especially if he or she had an accomplice, and the bag exchanged hands?…

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Changing User Behaviour

Changing User Behaviour I am currently reading the book Hooked, and happened to read something very important. I shared the excerpt with a design thinking group I am administrator of. The snippet read: John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while…

Goby the Fish
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Goby the Fish

I recently came across an article about an initiative to create awareness about marine pollution. Some folks living close to a beach (can’t seem to find the beach’s location), created a giant, transparent fish. Made of mesh and barbed wire, it had a signboard which read, ‘Goby loves plastic, please feed him.’ It made for…

Context
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Context

One of the fundamental ingredients of an impactful innovation or successful design thinking exercise, is empathy. The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Often, in our enthusiasm to create something someone (a customer segment, employees, or even society), or to solve a problem for them, we tend to knowingly or unknowingly speed…

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Lose Your Illusion

Lose Your Illusion Sometime last year, I had an interesting conversation with a friend’s girlfriend who is a psychologist. Between drawing inferences from my handwriting to discussing human behaviour in general. She also mentioned the acute dearth of mental health personnel in the country (India) at the moment. I did some reading around that. The…

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Gucci’s Packaging – Not so Gucci

Gucci’s Packaging – Not so Gucci I recently conducted an interactive session on Design Thinking at a leading investment bank. It might be easy to assume that applications of design thinking at an investment bank are limited. It is quite the opposite though. And the applicable scope of design thinking just seems to grow bigger…