Why and how you should use Design Thinking in your daily life

Emerging Technologies are causing massive changes throughout the world, companies such as Uber, Netflix and Just Eat have appeared out of seemingly nowhere. This has become known as the ‘Digital Disruption’, it is disruptive from the perspective of existing companies in the market place. As stated by Pierre Nanterme, CEO of Accenture “Digital is the main reason just over half of the companies in the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000”. Importantly, for those with an entrepreneurial and forward thinking mind-set this is a gold rush of opportunity. The disruption has only just started, even now start-ups are emerging with new ways of thinking. Take the fully app based Atom Bank for example, when creating their company and app they decided to code in a language usually used for gaming apps1. This gives it the flow and interactive capabilities not possible using the normal app languages. On top of this, the savings made not having branches is incredible and as you can imagine this disruption is making the banking world scramble to become more agile and innovative in order to keep up. Companies in every industry have noticed household names such as Blockbuster and… they if they aren’t creative and stay ahead of this disruption then they will face extermination, no one is too big to fail anymore. It would be no surprise if one of the Big Six Energy Suppliers were to go under in the near future.

Of course, in five years new companies will exist, overtaking and replacing current house-hold names. Some of these will undoubtedly be built on emerging technologies such as Machine Learning and Blockchain1. Although companies and entrepreneurs are only now looking into these as business viable technologies, they have been around in labs in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other Universities since the 60s, but only now are they advanced enough to be useable from a business perspective.