Design Thinking is a methodology for innovation that combines creative analytical approaches and requires collaboration across disciplines. It draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business practice. This workshop will help Innovation Tournament participants create solutions that are patient-focused through new ways of being intentional and collaborative.

Design Thinking is a Mindset.  Design Thinking is about believing we can make a difference, and having an intentional process in order to get to new, relevant solutions that create positive impact. Design Thinking gives you faith in your creative abilities and a process for transforming difficult challenges into opportunities for design.

The key characteristics of the Design Thinking framework are:

• Human-Centered – the process begins from deep empathy and understanding of needs and motivations of people (patients, providers, administrators, insurers, regulators, etc.)
• Collaborative – several great minds bringing multiple perspectives are always stronger when solving a challenge than just one
• Optimistic – Design Thinking is the fundamental belief that we all can create change regardless of how big a problem, how little time or how small a budget
• Experimental – Design Thinking gives you permission to fail and to learn from your mistakes, because you come up with new ideas, get feedback and iterate

Innovation Tournament participants will be exposed to the Lean Startup methodology and explore commercial viability of their ideas. The Lean Startup process consists of three elements: business model canvas, customer discovery and Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This is a hypothesis-based approach where participants are encouraged to articulate their assumptions, test them in a structured manner and quickly attempt solutions.

The key elements of Lean Startup Include:

• Business Model Canvas – the business model canvas is a shorthand way to frame the key elements of your business. Based on the canvas the teams can frame questions (or hypotheses) to test during the customer discovery process.
• Customer Discovery – this is the key process of Lean Startup framework that consists of iterative sequence of steps: defining a hypothesis, designing an experiment (customer interview), conducting an experiment (interviewing – asking questions, inferring insights, learning more about customer motivations and drivers); and validating or redesigning initial hypothesis.
• Minimum Viable Product – the minimum viable product refers to the minimum feature set that will get your customers to buy the product. Defining the MVP helps early stage businesses to build only the most important features in a product (and avoid wasting money building features that the market doesn’t really want or won’t pay for.