Design a Better Business

Introduction

Design a better business and the double loop 08

Prepare

Prepare your team, your environment, and how you work 24

Point of View

Be a rebel, develop your vision, create design criteria 46

Understand

Understand your customer, context, and business 82

Ideate

Learn to ideate, expand your ideas, and select ideas 124

Prototype

Bring ideasto life, sketch, and make prototypes 152

Validate

Find the riskest assumption, experiment, and pivot 180

Scale

When and how to scale, Investment Readiness Level 214

Appendix

Index, the team, and acknowledgments

"The world around you - and your business - is filled with uncertainty. But, within that uncertainty exist enumerable opportunities to design (or redesign) game-changing businesses. These opportunities are there for the taking, if you know how to look for them."
--Design A Better Business

"The beauty of taking a design approach is that everything starts with the human factor. You base your entire discovery process on a real need about real people. If you try to build a business that's not grounded on that, you're building the business on sand."
--Corey Ford, Founder and Managing Director, Matter Ventures

"Designers learn that you don't have to wait for someone else to make changes. In the context of sustainability and resource scarcity, we need 6 billion more people that think like this to make positive change. Let's introduce the design process to education, in kindergarten and on up. Somewhere between kindergarten and twelfth grade, we tell them that they can't do this anymore."
--Nathan Shedroff, Founding Director, Design MBA Program

"Using the 5 bold steps vision we were able to co-create our "strategy on a page," linking the purpose and vision to clear strategic priorities provided clear direction, and ensured that everyone across the bank would interpret and explain the strategy consistently. That strategy on a page still guides us today."
--Dorothy Hill, VP, Strategy, ING Bank

"Taking advantage of our innate ability to see - both with our eyes and with our mind's eye - in order to discover ideas that are otherwise invisible, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way they simply "get." Welcome to a whole new way of looking at design in business."
--Dan Roam, Author, The Back of the Napkin

"Story" has become a buzzword, but that's just story with a little "s." What I'm talking about is story with a big "S": the art of communicating your ideas using a persuasive narrative structure. It's a story that has a beginning, middle, and end, and uses dramatic principles of tension and contrast to move your audience to a different state of thinking, feeling, and acting."
--Nancy Duarte, Author, Founder, CEO, Duarte Design

"Nowadays an increasing number of business schools are teaching business model innovation as well as the tools for design and innovation. But we are still very much at the start."
--Alexander Osterwalder, Co-Founder Strategyzer, Lead Author of Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design

Patrick van der Pijl is CEO of Business Models Inc. and producer of the worldwide best seller Business Model Generation. He is passionate about helping entrepreneurs, leaders, rebels and corporate companies to innovate their business model and design a future strategy.

Justin Lokitz is the co-author of Design A Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation, a strategy blogger and frequent contributing author, as well as an experienced strategy designer and managing director of the Business Models Inc. offices in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, CA USA. He has 16+ years of experience of managing product strategies for large, multi-national corporations, like Autodesk and Oracle, as well as several startups.
Justin has a MBA in Design Strategy, from California College of the Arts, a BA in Environmental Science and Geography, from University of California Santa Barbara, as well as professional certifications in software development and product management, from University of California Berkeley

Maarten van Lieshout is partner at Thirty-X. He has applied visual thinking at an early stage for a Dutch idea factory, turning ideas into visual and tangible experiences. He always brings a new perspective to the table - and always stimulates others to get involved in the action.

Erik van der Pluijm is founder and creative director at Thirty-X. He is passionate about visual thinking and making complex things simple. He mixes design, code and strategy, using his experience from art and design, artificial intelligence, computer games, and the startup scene.