Having met Beverly Ingle and hearing her speak about design thinking, I was enlightened and enthused. With a depth of knowledge and obvious passion for the usage of design thinking, she has already helped many business people, myself included, inject greater creativity into problem solving to deliver better results—something that is a must for left-brainers! She has an amazingly refreshing ability to create deep understanding within her audience, and a hands-on, practical approach ensures that the results are manageable and within your grasp. —Jill Robb, CEO, Ambition Digital; Belfast, United Kingdom Design Thinking for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses: Putting the Power of Design to Work is the first book on the subject for smaller businesses. Until now, design thinking—a methodology for solving business problems and identifying opportunities—has been the playground for companies with big budgets, giving them the advantage of the innovation that comes from using the latest design thinking tools emerging from Stanford, Harvard, Northwestern, and elsewhere. Now, thanks to design thinking expert Beverly Ingle, entrepreneurs and small-business owners can make the design thinking playground their own—and on a much smaller budget. Ingle provides the tools entrepreneurs need as well as step-by-step processes that show how to use design thinking methods to transform your business and drive organizational success. Design Thinking for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses offers just enough theory to provide you with working knowledge of design thinking, but its value lies in the practical, proven, hands-on information that you can put to use immediately. You will learn: How to incorporate design thinking processes into everyday operations, and in what areas of business the approach is most valuable How to use the most prevalent and popular design thinking tools (like ideation, prototyping, and rapid branding) effectively How to use design thinking to identify and achieve your business goals and create new business models How to create revenue-boosting new products and services using design thinking How to improve the customer/user experience to create more loyal, profitable customers By the time you've finished reading the last chapter of Design Thinking for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses, you will not just be thinking about producing new products and services, boosting customer service, or developing new business opportunities—you'll be doing it. Best, it’ll show up in the top and bottom lines.

We are living in fascinating times, when the power of technology is not just reshaping, but is transforming the globe in unprecedented ways. These include the ability to connect with anyone across the globe in an instant using a tiny device in the palm of our hands to the availability of self-learning systems to take over, not only the most mundane of tasks, but the most sophisticated tasks previously thought to be performable only by superior human faculties. Regardless of whether you consider this progress to be beneficial to society or harmful, these technological advancements are here to stay. On one hand, these current transformational technological advancements threaten this stability of society. On the other hand, they present an opportunity for all of us to awaken our inner entrepreneurs. This book makes the transition from an employee to an entrepreneur smooth for the masses. Many of us have ideas to improve this world in some way and even feel strongly about some of those ideas at a deeper level. However, we find ourselves perplexed on two levels: 1. Where to start when building an idea into a business? 2. What are the various dimensions and activities needed to launch an idea into a business? This book will introduce you to a structured framework, called Transform3+1, to transform your idea into a business by following simple and specific steps spread across four stages. The framework is grounded in the belief that all solutions solve human problems using technology or otherwise. The first stage will help you understand the problem facing your target user by building empathy. Once you understand the problem, comes the stage of devising a solution in an iterative manner through prototyping the new concept and validating with the user. Most start-ups fail not because they didn’t find the right problem to solve for the target user or that their solution lacked technological prowess but because they could not figure out a sustainable business model. Third stage will focus on crafting a business model. And the final stage introduces you to a unique approach of managing risk associated with your venture. This unique framework leverages the principles of Design Thinking, agile development, and lean start-up combined in an easy to follow manner by anyone and helps transform ideas into business in a short timeframe with little or no investment.

A comprehensive playbook for applied design thinking in business and management, complete with concepts and toolkits As many companies have lost confidence in the traditional ways of running a business, design thinking has entered the mix. Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation presents a framework for design thinking that is relevant to business management, marketing, and design strategies and also provides a toolkit to apply concepts for immediate use in everyday work. It explains how design thinking can bring about creative solutions to solve complex business problems. Organized into five sections, this book provides an introduction to the values and applications of design thinking, explains design thinking approaches for eight key challenges that most businesses face, and offers an application framework for these business challenges through exercises, activities, and resources. An essential guide for any business seeking to use design thinking as a problem-solving tool as well as a business method to transform companies and cultures The framework is based on work developed by the author for an executive program in Design Thinking taught in Harvard Graduate School of Design Author Idris Mootee is a management guru and a leading expert on applied design thinking Revolutionize your approach to solving your business's greatest challenges through the power of Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation.

The result of extensive international research with multinationals, governments, and non-profits, Design Thinking at Work explores the challenges that organizations face when developing creative strategies to innovate and solve problems. Now available for the first time in paper, Design Thinking at Work explores how many organizations have embraced "design thinking" as a fresh approach to fundamental problems, and how it may be applied in practice. Design thinkers constantly run headlong into challenges in bureaucratic and hostile cultures. Through compelling examples and stories from the field, Dunne explains the challenges they face, how the best organizations, including Procter & Gamble and the Australian Tax Office, are dealing with these challenges, and what lessons can be distilled from their experiences. Essential reading for anyone interested in how design works in the real world, Design Thinking at Work challenges many of the wild claims that have been made for design thinking, while offering a way forward.

Most companies today have innovation envy. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative: they spend on R & D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants; but they still get disappointing results. Roger Martin argues that to innovate and win, companies need 'design thinking'.

Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How big data is transforming the creative industries, and how those industries can use lessons from Netflix, Amazon, and Apple to fight back. “[The authors explain] gently yet firmly exactly how the internet threatens established ways and what can and cannot be done about it. Their book should be required for anyone who wishes to believe that nothing much has changed.” —The Wall Street Journal “Packed with examples, from the nimble-footed who reacted quickly to adapt their businesses, to laggards who lost empires.” —Financial Times Traditional network television programming has always followed the same script: executives approve a pilot, order a trial number of episodes, and broadcast them, expecting viewers to watch a given show on their television sets at the same time every week. But then came Netflix's House of Cards. Netflix gauged the show's potential from data it had gathered about subscribers' preferences, ordered two seasons without seeing a pilot, and uploaded the first thirteen episodes all at once for viewers to watch whenever they wanted on the devices of their choice. In this book, Michael Smith and Rahul Telang, experts on entertainment analytics, show how the success of House of Cards upended the film and TV industries—and how companies like Amazon and Apple are changing the rules in other entertainment industries, notably publishing and music. We're living through a period of unprecedented technological disruption in the entertainment industries. Just about everything is affected: pricing, production, distribution, piracy. Smith and Telang discuss niche products and the long tail, product differentiation, price discrimination, and incentives for users not to steal content. To survive and succeed, businesses have to adapt rapidly and creatively. Smith and Telang explain how. How can companies discover who their customers are, what they want, and how much they are willing to pay for it? Data. The entertainment industries, must learn to play a little “moneyball.” The bottom line: follow the data.