Empathy. That is often the secret to making a successful sale. It goes well beyond merely googling for your potential customer and reading some of the top results that show up, or trawling through their LinkedIn and Facebook pages. It also includes putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and seeing the world through their eyes.
Go to any major auto show, and you are likely to be wowed by the futuristic ideas and cutting-edge technologies embedded in various vehicles. Some of the concept vehicles and transpiration systems on display may even look like something straight out of a science fiction flick. These solutions may look slick, but an important question soon pops up — can everyone use them? How inclusive are they?
Local problems often need local solutions. And for that, you invariably need local expertise. In a paper titled Design Thinking for Social Innovation, authors Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt argue that design thinking is best delivered by spending time with users or citizens in their own environments, rather than working on a project abstractly in another space.