2.6 Design Thinking in Entrepreneurship: From idea to the first client

Agility means something more than flexibility, it means building the product or services in small pieces and reacting to change and critical customer feedback. Unfortunately, in many, usually large companies, not everyone has access to feedback from the customer. It often gets lost in different departments. Thanks to multidisciplinary teams, you can decide together in which direction you want to develop and how this affects various departments of your company. It seems to be difficult and time consuming, but it’s beneficial for the company in the long run. The key to being agile is an organisational culture focused on collaboration, experimentation, and learning by experience. Design Thinking tools help agile teams create certain habits, including customer centricity, user research, visualisation and others. Some of these helpful tools are described in chapter 4.

The skills that are certainly worth developing in a team, are:

- Ability to solve problems creatively - Ability to learn quickly from feedback - Empathy with the clients and the employees - Understanding and recognizing opportunities in a crisis (resilience) - Anti-fragility: being aware of various future scenarios

This cannot be provided by a robot - you need real people with their “arsenal” of skills and competences, mentioned in previous chapters.

2.6 Design Thinking in Entrepreneurship: From idea to the first client

After this large portion of theory, let’s have a look at your business idea and how Design Thinking can help you… An idea that looks so promising and motivates you to start immediately with its development. Or maybe you have already decided to incorporate the business? Wait, it is worth validating the idea first! In next chapters we will follow development of the idea to business with Design Thinking.

Let’s look at an entrepreneurial roadmap composed of multiple steps. Solidifying the business idea and model starts long before the actual formalities of registering the enterprise. Many entrepreneurs are so in love with their ideas they have trouble seeing any critique early enough and end up building the business based on assumptions. The more solid a business idea, the more chances that business will become successful and sustainable. A Design Thinking mindset and its tools help entrepreneurs structure the creation of their venture and