Abstract
The business environment is changing more rapidly than in the past. Understanding and addressing customer needs is key for being competitive. Disruption is becoming the new normal. Traditional strategy development processes are analytical, linear, problem focused, and backward-looking. They fail to cope with these new dynamics. A paradigm shift is required to address strategy successfully. Design thinking has emerged as a promising approach coping with the increased uncertainty and allows focusing on the strategic aspects that matter most. Design thinking is an abductive approach to solving wicked problems, combining the advantages of design and thinking. Design thinking for strategy supports designing the strategy of a firm around customers and their jobs-to-be-done. Design thinking for strategy relies on the business model canvas as a common language, combined with game theory to embed the resulting strategy outcome into the real world. In addition, design thinking for strategy uses resources (time and money) wisely and focuses on results rather than effort. This ensures that the outcome is a strategy that exhibits four key traits required for success: desirability, feasibility, viability, and uniqueness.
The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing—Albert Einstein
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Notes
- 1.
These five forces are (1) industry competition, (2) potential new entrants, (3) power of suppliers, (4) power of buyers, and (5) threat from substitute products and services.
- 2.
SWOT—Strength Weakness Opportunity Threat.
- 3.
A wicked problem is a problem that does not have a definite solution and as such cannot be solved using linear problem-solving techniques. Solving wicked problems requires continuous reformulation of the problem.
- 4.
Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference which starts by observing, followed by searching for the simplest and most likely explanation, refining it until the solution is considered sound.
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Diderich, C. (2020). Understanding the Need for a New Approach to Strategy Development. In: Design Thinking for Strategy. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25875-7_1
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