Creative Thinking

The Edge

Imran Shafiq Malik

Red Ocean
Strategy
Red Oceans are all the
industries in existence
today—the known market
space. In the red oceans,
industry boundaries are
defined and accepted. As
the market space gets
crowded, prospects for
profits and growth are
reduced.
Blue Ocean
Strategy
Blue oceans, in contrast,
denote all the industries not
in existence today—the
unknown market space. In
blue oceans, competition is
irrelevant because their rules
of the game are waiting to
be set. Blue ocean is an
analogy to describe the
wider, deeper potential of
market space that is not yet
explored.
IN PEOPLE NEEDS
 A NEW CONCEPT

DESIGN THINKING
INNOVATION &
DESIGN
Design has evolved
from a narrow
discipline dealing
with the form and
function of products
into a major new
approach to
developing business
models.
When people
talk about
innovation
in this decade,
they really
mean design.
Design thinking, a way of thinking
that parallels other ways of thinking
- like science thinking - but offers a
way of approaching issues, problems
and opportunities almost uniquely
suited to innovation.

Design Thinking: Driving Innovation,

Charles L. Owen, Distinguished Professor
Emeritus, Institute of Design, Illinois
Institute of Technolog
…Companies have to focus on
innovation to be competitive.
That driving need makes design
thinking the hottest trend in
business culture today. If
engineering, control, and
technology were once the
central tenets of business
culture, then anthropology,
creativity, and an obsession with
consumers‘ unmet needs will
inform the future.

The Talent Hunt, BusinessWeek, 2006

Companies have a
“targeted” intelligence to
track issues that
strategically important
but lack an “open”
process to recognize
emerging patterns and
issues that no one has yet
identified as strategic.

Corporate Radar:
Best-Practices Survey Results /SRI Consulting
Business Intelligence –formerly Stanford Research
Institute)
 WE NEED PERCEPTUAL
THINKING, CREATIVE
THINKING AND DESIGN
THINKING: NONE OF
THESE IS PART OF OUR
TRADITIONAL SYSTEM
OF LOGIC AND
ANALYSIS.

EDWARD DE BONO
TODAY
PERCEPTIVENESS
IS MORE IMPORTANT
THAN ANALYSIS.

PETER DRUCKER
 Redesign of business education
• By using sketching and diagramming techniques, the MBAs mapped customer
experiences in ways that fundamentally reshaped their Strategies and led to the
creation of many new business models.
• A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial
analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used
ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them.
• Business school students would have developed a single new product to
• sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that
might appeal to consumers.
• B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product
idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of
possible winners.

Sources:
Design-Thinking and theMBA Curriculum,
Darden School of Business, 2008;
The Talent Hunt, BusinessWeek, 2006.
Redesign of Business Education

Nike, General Electric, McDonald's, Intel,

Procter & Gamble and many others are looking
beyond traditional sources of leadership to a new set of
schools and programs to find Innovative managers.
Whether your goal is to develop new products or
services, a new way of marketing to your
customer, or to reinvent your entire business
model, “design thinking” holds valuable clues
as to how to get to bigger ideas, faster and more
efficient.
Today’s business people do not need to
understand designers better. They need
to become designers.