Does the future of successful business innovation involve increasing literacy in design thinking principles?

For any financial service provider, like MLP, customer proximity is the single most important aspect in daily business – especially as financial consultancy services require lots of trust. But with the hit of the financial crisis the perception of financial services changed drastically. For many people the financial sector is lacking transparency and being perceived as confusingly complex.

New Zealand may be small, but they are not shy to try new things and employ the latest tools and methods to make the best future they can for their people. Here are 5 examples of the use of design thinking in the government of New Zealand.

If the one product you’re known for is ubiquitous, how can you stop your customers from leaving for other banks?

For Capital One, the answer was a small laboratory within the larger bank. The group leading this innovative push calls themselves Capital One Labs, and their secret weapon is free coffee.

Design Thinking has found many applications in the finance sector within financial institutions. It should not come as a surprise as financial institutions, like any other businesses, have to focus on the customer and their needs in order to succeed.

According to the UXDA (UX Digital Advantage), the finance industry has experienced a turbulent period of Fintech disruption in recent years. In fact, 75% of the finance sector companies surveyed by KPMG stated that changing customer needs is the key area where disruptive Fintech companies have been challenging the traditional finance businesses.

The last year has presented us with the challenge of planning and conducting research and filmmaking remotely. This has been a good opportunity to open new conversations and invite fresh, diverse and, in some cases, untested expertise into our network. We wanted to write something for those wondering what is possible vis-a-vis a remote research approach.

Thanks to providers like Fidelity, people can rely on easy, convenient systems to stay on track with their retirement savings. But when it comes to saving for important near-term goals (think: vacation, house, or wedding), people tend to be less organized. 

Occasionally, a new way of organizing work leads to extraordinary improvements. Total quality management did that in manufacturing in the 1980s by combining a set of tools—kanban cards, quality circles, and so on—with the insight that people on the shop floor could do much higher level work than they usually were asked to.

How to use design thinking to make great things actually happen by Tim Brown and Roger L. Martin. In this great HBR article, the authors look at design thinking in Finance with two case studies, one from MassMutual and the other from Intercorp. Group of Peru.