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Design Thinking for social innovation
12 Lessons -
The level of awareness around social problems ignored both by existing businesses or government has never been higher, with more and more people trying to create viable solutions to those problems.
The RISE training programme brings new tools to social entrepreneurs. In the six sessions you will discover the value of listening and observing the customer, looking for hints on how to solve an existing problem. The impact we want to achieve with the RISE project though is beyond solving a problem - we want to equip you with the right tools to frame and re-frame a problem.
The RISE program focuses on creative thinking which is the essence of the entrepreneurship journey.
The lack of attention and focus in business education (at any level from entrepreneurship to management) towards creativity has pushed businesses to solve predominantly straightforward and clear problems. This is sadly the main reason the private sector and government not only struggle but frequently fail societal and environmental issues (which are by nature complicated and wicked).
The RISE project aims specifically at helping entrepreneurs to create sustainable business models tackling complicated issues or pursuing new and hidden opportunities for value creation.
What is a complicated or wicked problem? It is a problem which doesn’t have a specific definition, this makes it difficult to state the problem.
Creative and design thinking, two methods we will explore in the RISE programme help in refining and re-framing the problem/opportunity we want to tackle. Only after having refined and homed in on what the problem could be, we pass to prototyping and field experimentation and testing.
Quick prototyping de-risks the innovation process of entrepreneurs. By getting their users and customers experiencing a future that is not yet ‘real’ entrepreneurs can quickly and cheaply tweak the prototype (and their assumptions about it) based on the received feedback. There is conventional wisdom in the saying ‘’fake it till you make it’’.