What’s behind SPJIMR’s design thinking

A shamiana covers the large lawn at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) in suburban Andheri in Mumbai. Dotting the vast expanse are many tables and chairs; scores of students pore over a variety of eclectic models, made from clay or lego sets to drawings on chart paper. The debate is intense as batches of students explain their efforts to faculty members, who are asking them pointed questions.

Around 250 students of the two-year PGDM programme are involved in a design thinking workshop set up to provoke creative and innovative thinking among the students. Students have to work on internal problems or issues that confront the B-school and try and come up with creative solutions. Imagination is high, but they aren’t building castles in the air; all of them have to come up with a potentially workable business solution and quick prototypes to get early signals from users.

Food, connectivity apps

One batch of students is working on a plan for an app through which students can order their breakfast or snacks, which will be delivered on a cart that will roll up at their hostels.

Says an excited student about the app his team is working on: “In a tough MBA programme, students tend to miss breakfast as they are so busy. We want to give the students the experience of an app will be cashless. There will be a pre-paid wallet facility. Another insight from primary research is that after 10 pm, there is nowhere to eat; we either order in or go out. So this cart can supply food late into the night as well. We’ve envisaged a sale of around ₹6,000 a day on sale of food.”

The team had done its leg work in finding out the cost of the cart that can supply food, the economics of it and the break-even. The app can be created in-house by the team.

Another team elsewhere has rolled out a prototype of an app that will improve the connect between recent batches of students to promote student-alumni interaction, discussion groups, and so on. Once a batch passes out, there isn’t much interaction with immediate succeeding batches and the app can promote this connect, points out a student.

Creative approach

Prof Suranjan Das, who is spearheading the design thinking course, says the essence of it is to do with innovation and creativity. Creativity doesn’t mean being good at art, a limited view of creativity, but in the ability to think creatively in an approach to a business problem.

“Design thinking makes you a process expert, not a subject expert. The brief is you pick up anything related to the Bhavan’s campus (where SPJIMR is located) and think of something which will be useful to the institute. Think of the infra issues, the services, canteen / dhobi services, communication, and look at what benefit can accrue to institute, and go through the process and give a prototype of what you can do. The students have to talk to all stakeholders, come up with an insight, throw up ideas and generate a rapid prototype,” explains Prof Das.

He adds that it is a process specialisation which allows you to think differently. “It’s the way you look at life, you can use deep insightful questions in all contexts,” he adds.

Assessing the teams

The students are assessed on the quality of insight, the type of questions, and the answers they come up with. Once these ideas are in place, they create a model. They also have to do the financials, and come up with a one page business plan. “It’s the thinking behind it that we assess,” says Prof Das.

The teams that came out on top for their design thinking project were in the areas of food and recreation (Team Spark); environment and sustainability (Team Urja); Education (iLearn); Infrastructure (SpaceZ); and Food (Aao Banao Khao)

SPJIMR introduced this course after collaborating with Prof Srikant Datar of Harvard Business School, who has been doing a lot of research in this area and felt that B-school students have good knowledge and skill levels, but it is the attitude that needs to be honed. “Their skills remain, but the aspect of managing teams, culture, diversity, that’s where we began,” says Prof Das.

The course is in phases and in the last phase, the students will go out and talk to real customers, wherever they are located, and look at solving actual problems that businesses are confronted with. “We have 42 projects coming up; we will take the top three and refine them and see if we can put the solutions into practice. If students can become process experts, they can be successful in any job.”

Ranjan Banerjee, Dean, SPJIMR, says the design thinking approach helps to solve problems in an unstructured environment, which is what students will increasingly face when they go out of B-school to work.

Embedding design across courses

“We have put together Prof Datar’s and my material and created our own version, and Indianised the design thinking course. We have run it twice but we are going to run the course across all programmes and embed design thinking projects in our courses. It will teach people a process and equip students with design thinking as a skill for life,” says Prof Banerjee.

Traditional B-schools teach one structured problems, with usually one right answer, he says. But, typically, real world problems are not structured and don’t have one right answer; problem definition is also a critical part of solving a problem.

“You have to first immerse yourself and then you will be able to come up with a problem definition. So, it’s a lot about talking to the users, seeing the world through their prism, abandoning your biases, creating the prototype of a half-formed idea and taking it back to user. This way, students who are trained to solve structured problems can also confront the ambiguous situations they are more likely to face in a VUCA world,” elaborates Prof Banerjee.

The students are currently out in rural India working on their social NGO projects. What better place to apply design thinking, where they will encounter largely unstructured problems.