The pressure of inflation can really get under your skin. With rising prices, businesses are experiencing tight budgets and low profits. What can you do as a startup, corporate leader, or large company manager to stay competitive in the market?
A creative professional would apply design thinking solutions to rethink business models and processes that would launch the business like hydroplanes across the red ocean. These experienced visionaries will get the business to pivot and react to crisis with innovative ideas.
Before moving to the solution, you need to know the problem. So, what is the actual cause of inflation? It’s a ripple effect caused by 3 categories, namely, demand-pull, cost-push and inflation expectations. To put it in layman terms, there is more supply than demand. Hence, prices go up causing those with lesser financial freedom to budget their expenditure more tightly.
Now you’re thinking ‘So design thinking can help meh?’. Well, the short answer is NO! design thinking is not a tool to you can just use to fix an issue rather its a problem-solving method that emphasises understanding and attending the needs of the people/customers, employees or investors. Combining this with a creative mindset, you’ll be able to do wonders.
There are 5 steps involved in this process:
- Empathizing with users
- Define the issue
- Ideate solutions
- Prototype
- Testing
You can learn how to use these steps “creatively” in our Design Thinking for Innovation training course. Once you have completed the training, you’ll be geared up and be user-centered innovative, adaptable and lighting responsive to challenging situations like inflation.
Let’s look at 2 case studies that has real life examples of using design thinking to innovate solutions.
Case Study 1: Airbnb 2008 Financial Crisis
Airbnb faced a severe drop in the travel business. Do you think they just gave up and went like ‘Die lah! Confirm cannot recover from this’? Of course not! They got creative and saw this as a new business opportunity. They provided 2 groups of people with a single solution which was giving homeowners the occasion to earn extra ka-chings $$$ and travelers looking for a more affordable place to stay.
Just by thinking out of the box and focusing on the human needs, they revolutionised the hospitality industry by creating added-value for homeowners and travelers by solving the pain point of both parties. Through this user-centred creativity, Airbnb’s growth skyrocketed upwards.
Case Study 2: PepsiCo vs Rising Cost
When it came to quantity or quality, PepsiCo chose quality. Why? Because customers liked the product quality of PepsiCo and no way they were going to compromise that. So how did they beat inflation then? Ting! Ting! Ting!, you guessed it, by applying design thinking to optimise resources, they managed to reduced expenses and materials while maintaining quality. PepsiCo even found ways to reformulate their products without any changing the taste.
Design thinking aided PepsiCo to not disappoint their customers while reducing cost when prices were hiking up.
By now you should know why design thinking is essential to businesses, if in case you don’t, let me break it down for you. With design thinking, your business can:
- Adapt & innovate to crisis
- Retain quality while cutting costs (not your workforce)
- Be resilient during inflationary times
Want to stay ahead and be prepared when faced with a crisis other than inflation? Join WipData Academy‘s training on ‘Design Thinking for Innovation‘ and you too can remarkable like Airbnb or PepsiCo during the darkest and toughest storms. Don’t worry if you are not creative, we will cover that too during our training sessions. 😉
Contact our Training Manager, Roy (roy@wipdata.com) and find out on our HRD Corp Courses or visit our website at www.wipdata.com for more information.