What happens when Design Thinking meets Blue Ocean Strategy?

Our answer: bluETHinking. Together with Benjamin Gsponer, Georg Windisch, Sonja Förster and Stefano Brusoni, we combined the best methods out of both approaches to identify future growth opportunities and created a customized Method Kit for Siemens.

There are many different ways to drive innovation within a company, hence, there are even more tools and methods that can be applied in the innovation process to create new products, services or solutions. While Design Thinking focuses on customer-centricity in innovation, the Blue Ocean Strategy aims at developing long-term sustainable business models. Now, there is some overlap of the methods applied in both approaches, which is why the combination of the two makes it even more powerful to bring customer-centered innovations with a long-term sustainable business models to market.

Why not combine the best out of both worlds?

BluETHinking complements the well-known Blue Ocean Strategy with Design Thinking rationale.
We do so to blend high-level strategizing with tools that deliver tangible results on the product level. Participants revisit their business model and explore the (non-)costumer landscape. These insights are then collapsed into concrete problem statements. Deliberate ideation paves the way to generate potential solutions, all of which aim at reaching customers in unconventional ways. Prototyping and testing of candidate solutions rounds up the bluETHinking concept.

At Spark Labs @ETHZ, we care a lot about translating our insights from research and theory into practice. BluETHinking combines our work on business model innovation and Design Thinking. We employ Design Thinking tools to provide a structured approach to problem solving but also to build a safe and playful atmosphere within the team. Thus, our concept provides a platform to experience tangibility and safety – both important features to sustainably innovate.

Innovation in your hands

The outcome of this project is the bluETHinking Method Kit: a combination of the most important methods from Design Thinking as well as Blue Ocean Strategy. Structured into six main phases, the kit consists of 35 cards, each capturing the essence of the individual methods explaining how it’s used. The method is visually supported with colored illustrations as well as a description of the benefits of each method and the resources required to perform a certain activity. This makes the bluETHinking Method Kit an ideal tool to use in ideation workshops or to support any other innovation activity.