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Design thinking guide

Design Thinking Made Simple:
A Business Owner’s Guide

Not sure where to start with design thinking? This guide breaks it down, showing how you can use it to drive creativity, innovation, and growth in your business.

What Is Design Thinking? Understanding the Basics

Design thinking is a practical, human-centered (and optimistic!) approach to solving problems creatively. Originating from the design world, it focuses on understanding people’s needs, reframing problems, and generating innovative solutions.
It’s structured around five key stages:

  1. Empathise – Understand the user’s needs and experiences.

  2. Define – Clearly articulate the problem.

  3. Ideate – Generate creative solutions.

  4. Prototype – Build tangible representations of ideas.

  5. Test – Gather feedback to refine and improve.

Colorful illustrated diagram about design thinking, featuring elements like problem understanding, brainstorming, embracing ambiguity, creativity, iteration, and growth mindset, with associated sketches of brains, people, arrows, water, signs, and a person meditating.
A group of three people standing in a room with large windows and patterned curtains, engaged in a presentation or discussion. One person is holding a board with notes, another is standing near a large screen displaying an image of a building and a bus with the text 'Hop on,' while the third person stands with arms crossed, smiling.

How Can Design Thinking Be Useful for your Business?

Design thinking can help your business:

  • Identify opportunities for growth and innovation.

  • Solve tricky, persistent problems in fresh ways.

  • Align teams around a common understanding of challenges and solutions.

  • Boost customer satisfaction by focusing on their real needs.

  • Accelerate time to market by quickly prototyping and testing ideas.

Whether you’re a founder of a startup or managing a growing team, design thinking helps you make smarter decisions with more confidence.

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design thinking is more than product design

Design thinking is widely used for product design, but the principles apply to many areas of business, including:

  • Improving processes (e.g., streamlining operations or customer journeys).

  • Creating better services (e.g., enhancing onboarding experiences).

  • Developing strategies (e.g., rethinking go-to-market plans or brand positioning).

  • Building teams (e.g., fostering collaboration and creative problem-solving).

How Long Does design thinking Take?

The length of time depends on the scope and complexity of the problem.
Design thinking can happen in:

  • A single day—for quick workshops focused on reframing challenges and generating ideas.

  • A few weeks—for more involved projects where you prototype and test multiple solutions.

  • Ongoing sprints—as part of a longer-term innovation process embedded in your business.

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At Spark + Forge, we tailor the process to fit your needs—whether it’s a rapid-fire session or a more immersive journey.

Get started with a Boost Workshop and turn hours and hours of of meetings into one day of impact, ideas and action.

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What are some of the Tools and Techniques Can We Use from Design Thinking?

empathy mapping

Understand your customers’ thoughts, feelings, and needs.

‘How Might We?’

Frame problems as opportunities for co-creation.

journey mapping

Visualise your customers’ experience step-by-step.

rapid prototyping

Turn ideas into tangible models or concepts.

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design thinking in ACTION

A six-panel infographic about problem-solving and experimentation. The first panel features a logo for Spark + Forge with the tagline "Creativity Means Business." The second panel discusses understanding and framing the problem, citing an example about making teams more productive. The third panel shows a template for designing experiments with the Spark Action Card. The fourth panel highlights framing the hypothesis with an example of a weekly show and share meeting. The fifth panel asks for small test ideas for team experiments, illustrated with a funnel and rocks. The sixth panel promotes tools and guides available at sparkforge.uk with the Spark + Forge logo.

Struggling with disengaged teams, stuck projects, or ideas that never seem to take off? From Problems to Prototypes (PDF) is a practical and highly visual guide designed to help you uncover the root of challenges, spark fresh ideas, and turn them into actionable experiments.

Read the guide

Design Thinking can be transformative - check out these success stories from the likes of big names like Airbnb and IKEA to pharmaceutical start-ups and social sector organisations.
8 great design thinking examples

DESIGN THINKING case study

BRINGING design thinking TO A SALES TEAM IN ONE DAY

Elevate your usual meeting or team ‘off site’ into something engaging, fun and informative. All while generating new ideas and breaking new ground as you go.

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