Business Design
Business Design is a Human-centered Design approach to business challenges. It applies the principles and practices of design to help organizations create new value and new forms of competitive advantage. At its core, Business Design is the integration of customer empathy, experience design and business strategy.
In IDEO’s visualization, innovative solutions hit the sweet spot where viability, desirability, and feasibility overlap. Business designers, to put it simply, design for viability.
At the beginning of a project, business designers often translate what the client wants — say, more repeat transactions — into generative design challenges for our teams. We might rephrase this particular need into a brainstorm question like: How might we encourage loyalty in our existing customers?
Business design applies design and design thinking to business problems with the objective of bringing innovation to life.
- frame, direct and/or inform the design process through a business lens to ensure design solves business problems effectively.
- translate design solutions into value and impact through a language that business stakeholders are familiar with to prove design provides solutions to business problems.
- apply human-centered methodologies to strengthen business and financial components of design work to create services and products that are viable.
- Abductive thinking (incomplete set of obervations, likely hypotheses)
- e.g. design thinking
- Experiments
Further Reading
So You Want to Be a Business Designer? - IDEO Stories - Medium
What is Business Design? - Spotless Says - Medium


mm1-Lean-Startup-Poster-A0-EN_NEU.pdf
SXD_Tools_and_Methods_Poster.pdf
Tool- how might we statement builder.pdf