Business Design, where Purpose meets Reality

Business Design is a relatively new collaborative approach between the two fields of Business Management and Design. It merges the hard logic of business with the human-centred methodology of design to identify, create, and validate business ideas and models.

Business Design lets entrepreneurs use the principles of designers to help turn their ideas into reality. The method starts with your customers’ needs, incorporating your vision and learning from your own experiences. By combining analysis and strategic thinking with intuition and visualisation, you’ll be better equipped to create impactful business ventures.

Much more than being a fancy buzzword, it is a approach which can be used to create tangible business results, such as creating new revenue streams, business ventures, products and services, customer experiences, value propositions, organisational structures, and so on. It creates a system through which one can frame, shape, validate and bring innovation to life. Through The Little Booklet on Business Design, 2nd edition, Jonas Altman and Monika Hestad bring you a do-it-yourself guide/toolkit to move your idea from its current fuzzy state of existence to a viable business reality.  The business idea you have long-harboured but were not sure how to take forward.

The journey starts with reflecting on two fundamental questions:

1.      What inspires you?

2.      Why is this relevant?

 By first identifying these answers, you can create a culture that motivates employees, an offering that engages customers, and move towards turning your idea into a business reality.

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“Lemonade stand”, illustration from booklet, (Illustrated by Silvia Rigoni)

An in-depth four-stage process guide - Frame, Shape, Validate and Activate - helps you deep dive into key drivers for success, such as is the idea worthy, is it novel, who is it targeted to, what are its benefits, prototyping your business idea and testing it for feedback, building the business model, and so on. Each stage is further divided into sub-stages to fully explore its potential. Our process is linear, but the development of any business is rarely so straight. Finding the time to pause and take one or two steps back will give you the opportunity to reflect and refine your direction. Think of our process as cyclical, where you are just continuously improving. It is ideal for group workshops, allowing you to gain feedback and determine whether there is a suitable product and market fit.

And while you have donned the business designer’s hat, take some time to explore the five principles vital to entrepreneurship to help fuel you: Creativity, Resilience, Integration, Stability, and Purpose.

Creativity is a driving force for any adaptable business, with resilience being required as building a business means ups and downs, and an integration of all of your activities towards the same goal, whilst striving for stability in the sense of building a viable business and finally the necessity of purpose, for without a purpose why should you set it up to begin with. Embedding these in your daily work is key to mastering business design.

Business managers as well as design strategists are all moving to a place where design meets business. In the booklet’s toolkit section, you can find practical hands-on tools that can be used in combination with this booklet.

Find out how you can turn your ideas into a business reality in the ultimate DIY guide to business design, The Little Booklet on Business Design, 2nd edition, by Jonas Altman and Monika Hestad.

The Booklet is available in English and in Norwegian. Get in touch to learn more or buy your copy in our shop!