Empathize
In the Empathize phase of Design Thinking, you develop a deep understanding of the people affected by your innovation - be it customers, employees, or other stakeholders. As an SME, you can leverage your advantage of short communication paths and direct contacts.
This phase helps you recognize real needs and problems, gain new perspectives, and challenge your existing assumptions. Through targeted methods, you gather valuable insights that serve as the foundation for your innovations.
Our tools, specifically developed for SMEs, are resource-efficient and require no prior knowledge. They can be directly integrated into your daily business operations and enable an immediate start into the Design Thinking process.
The Business Model Generation Canvas, developed through extensive doctoral research by Osterwalder (2004), presents a systematic approach to business model analysis and development. Subsequent empirical validation studies by Zott et al. (2011) and Massa et al. (2017) have demonstrated the framework's efficacy in both academic research and practical applications. This methodological approach provides researchers with a structured system for analyzing and documenting business model components while maintaining academic rigor.
Method Description
Empathize is the first phase of the Design Thinking process that focuses on understanding users through observation and engagement. The goal is to gather qualitative insights about user needs, behaviors, and pain points by using methods such as interviews, personas, and customer journey mapping. These insights serve as the foundation for defining user-centered problems and developing relevant solutions.
Tool Collection
This tool collection helps you gather deep customer insights during the Empathize phase. It includes ready-to-use templates for customer interviews, personas, customer journey maps, and stakeholder maps, enabling SMEs to easily understand customer needs, behaviors, and pain points — the foundation for customer-centered innovation.
