Book review — Design Thinking for Business Growth: How to Design and Scale Business Models and Business Ecosystems
First published on goodreads here.
A pretty recent edition to the “landscape-shaped” design and innovation Must-Reads, made popular by Osterwalder and co.. “Design Thinking for Business Growth” caught my attention because of the specific subtitle on business ecosystems; given my day job, working with our clients and partners across multiple industries and work on the “B2B2X” business model over the last few years in particular, I was interested to see how design professionals are adapting their toolkit to better reflect the complexity of these multi-party dynamics.
Coming from the authors of the The Design Thinking Playbook and The Design Thinking Toolbox, this book is well researched and packed full of practical advice and tools. It builds on the now well-trodden lifecycle of design thinking ideation, lean startup MVP and scaling via “agile product development” and outlines a ton of thoughts on each stage and much of the content on these topics is a solid synthesis of the previous toolkits.
This book is, to my mind, best when it digs into:
- The role of design in identifying and creating new business models
- The roles of different players in creating a “MVE” (somewhat predictably and reassuringly, the “minimum viable ecosystem”)
On this second topic in particular, there are lots of builds on the standard tools for business models, hypotheses for testing at each stage of development and value proposition thinking when multiple parties are involved.
Most of the examples from the classic hyperscale and/or high tech ecosystems are familiar, but nicely deconstructed with some interesting takeouts on each one.
I have to admit I finished the book feeling that some of the tools were constructed rather than truly tried-and-tested, but the myriad templates for download and the heuristics and checklists are welcome additions to the likes of “Understanding, harnessing and developing organisational ecosystems” (review here: https://medium.com/just-another-blog-...).
