MBA - PGDM in Business Design

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A students’ perspective on the emergence of design thinking and its uses in managing big companies

13 Sep 2021
- admin
With my background as a B.A. Economics from one of the top colleges in Delhi university, I readily found a job on campus in one of the large private banks. Having worked in a banking setup for around two years, I realised that the routine work was humdrum and not challenging as I would like it to be. Further realising that up-skilling was the way forward, I decided to pursue an MBA to sharpen my management skills. I decided to dig deeper into finding a niche specialization that would not only impart core management concept learning, but also expose me to modern skills to help me take on new age challenges and tackle them.

Doing the right research to arm myself before I took the plunge, my extensive research took me to the concept of SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY. The concept set me thinking, as I realised that Social Technology could help make use of the creative capabilities of any stakeholders in an organisation, whether external or internal. It also had the potential to improve organizational effectiveness and goal direction setting. One of the key components of social technology was Design Thinking which has been taking the business world by storm these days. Business Leaders have started to realise that Design Thinking has the potential to lead the way in effective innovation practices through solutions that are compelling, enjoyable, and simple.

My curiosity led me to the MBA – PGDM in Business Design offered by SOIL Institute of Management, Gurugram, which integrated conventional core management concepts to design thinking skills with a view to develop a hands-on approach. This would stoke creative thinking ability required in any modern organizational context.

I decided to explore the concept of Design Thinking and came up with some interesting findings that ultimately guided my decision to take on an MBA in Business Design. Some key takeaways from my Design Thinking learnings:

What Is MBA In Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is an iterative process of deriving and understanding The User. The foundation of DT is a series of assumptions that lead up to the needs and wants of the consumer. Integration of a design thinking mindset to conventional business practices helps entrepreneurs and managers to build organizations through innovation. The process is a confluence of social science, design and strategic thinking with the view to create ture value for business. Value creation could be a subset of innovation in products, service delivery, internal or external processes, etc. The SOIL PGDM degree addresses the underlying concept, which is to develop a mindset to identify, strategize and solve business problems.

The process of design thinking is human-centric and innovative and includes user Empathy, and uses a series of contiguous steps of Brainstorming, Prototyping, Testing, and Implementation to arrive at a solution.

In the current marketplace, dominated by digital innovation and new models, understanding business design can be the difference in building a successful company.

Emergence And Relevance Of Design Thinking In MBA

Design Thinking has emerged and become at par in many industries and disciplines today. A relatively modern concept, there is no fixed approach that can fit all and continues to acquire depth and refining. In short, Design Thinking was a skill-set that would be applicable lifelong and would continue to evolve over time. This kind of excited me as I realised that a learning process that would continue to find relevance and evolution over time would be an asset to me along with the core management skills I would learn.

MBA in Design Thinking And Large Corporations

While design thinking has a role to play in Entrepreneurial setups and small businesses, I was keen to delve into how it would look like in a big company scenario.

Big corporations consider the PGDM degree in Design thinking relevant since it looks at a better way to creatively design new products/ services or to modify or extend existing ones. At the center are the unmet needs of customers. It is a continuous psychographic process that considers their ethnicity, behaviour, thinking, motivations, habits, and needs. Thus it is a human-centric approach.

Large organizations usually are process driven and thus decision making follows conventional lines that could be time consuming. Besides, decision making is based on past experiences that get documented as processes rather than a human-centric approach. Design thinking practitioners accelerate use a dynamic and practical approach that is un-conventional and customer centric. The approach could also be applied at redefining internal processes and thus design thinking has a unique methodology that could be applied to customers – external as well as internal. When decision making is spread over levels, as in a large company, this approach helps in cutting down time and arriving at solutions that are designed around the user. Besides, speedier solutions are also designed to deal with undefined problems that may crop up in a dynamic environment.

An integrated PGDM in Business Design helps businesses to effectively –
- Deal with problems/ challenges that may emerge in a dynamic marketplace (internal or external)
- Discovering current value propositions that could be leveraged for business growth
- Identification of stakeholder’s needs and wants that remain unsatisfied.
- Rediscovering the changing customer thought process
- Unravel new business opportunities for further evaluation
Applying design thinking will not only help businesses create innovative products, but it will also have a direct impact on the organization’s bottom line. No wonder then that large companies in the U.S. that followed the design thinking approach saw 10-year returns yielding 219% that of the S&P 500.

Some of the companies that have thrived on the Design Thinking approach are –

Airbnb – The promoters used design thinking and used the empathy approach to come up with solutions with the help of the app. The user could now rent apartments, order breakfast, and also communicate with the host like with a friend. The approach opened up a new vista of trust between the host and the guest and enabled bilateral feedback that could make the stay comfortable and seamless.

Netflix – The human-centered UX design powered by Artificial intelligence has been the backbone of the platform. The customer is the node as it covers the entire process of user interaction with the system. This has come through the design thinking approach where the company has invested billions of dollars to transition from a DVD rental company to a streaming platform that has the largest viewership in the world. Today the continued success of the concept and the business is based on a nonlinear reiterative approach of Think Big, Start small, Fail quickly and Scale Fast.

Companies that have understood this approach and built services and products solving real issues are the companies that are leading the world.

Armed with this knowledge, I came to the conclusion that Design thinking has a role to play in every organization, every sector, and every job title. Besides, effective design thinking strategies have the power to create a positive effect in a wide gamut of operational and innovative thought processes including-
- Product design and experience
- Service and experience design
- Business operations design
- Organizational change
- Leadership improvements… and more
Using the knowledge that I gathered, I took the plunge and joined the fastest emerging MBA courses in India – PGDM in Business Design at SOIL. I look forward to continuing learning that is based on an interdisciplinary curriculum that merges liberal arts, design thinking and core management concepts. This provides me with a new perspective to corporate life. I look to take this learning forward and become a change agent, one who looks at becoming a leader in the new, emerging India.

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