The Business Canvas project has been an interesting experience. I really enjoyed working with Steve and our meeting was fun and enjoyable. I would have liked to spend more time on the project or had more time beforehand to look over our textbook to get a better understanding of the business model canvas.
As this is the second company Steve has started, it was hard to offer suggestions or make insights about his company and how they can grow when the CEO doesn’t believe in growth and turns away business from companies that aren’t in line with BriteWeb’s values. One of our insights was to increase the channels between the company and client and while we wanted to recommend that the company focus on networking with the right clients, it was difficult for us to tie this into the business canvas as there was no space to discuss the company structure.
It was interesting to see how the company uses a number of elements of design thinking in the project they take on. Tim Brown mentions the importance of a human-centered approach, a blend of big and small projects, as well as designing for the cycle in his article “Design Thinking”. BriteWeb is able to take a human-centered approach since they deal with fairly similar companies and are able to provide them with the appropriate product. They keep a good mix of different sized projects, which helps to foster innovation in the way the company handles these projects. The cyclical nature of BriteWeb projects helps developers in the company to go from inspiration, to ideation, to implementation.
I found that the second major finding in “Design-Driven Innovation”, “people do not buy products but meanings”, was representative of why BriteWeb has experienced success. As the company only takes on work from companies, which share their values, they are able to increase the effectiveness of the websites they create. While they do not have any breakthrough technologies, they are able to provide “improved product solutions enabled by better analysis of customer needs”.
Finally, I think one of our biggest challenges was in the design strategy. Lockwood, and Thomas Walton mention “the typical design process begins with some sort of survey of the situation and the problem to be solved.” We struggled to find a problem with the company as they were fairly content with their current work and had no plans to grow the company in the future. While Steve mentioned that the company wanted to take on bigger projects with the same resources, we again struggled with finding a way to figure out if the current structure of the company would be able to handle larger projects.