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Co-Create puts focus on Design Thinking in management processes

Co-Create puts focus on Design Thinking in management processes

Turipamwe Design Agency has just launched a new service to guide local organisations in their quest to apply innovative thinking to their activities that require a measure of creativity.

Labelled Co-Create, Turipamwe said its new department is conducting a market survey to draft an industry white paper as a first step to map the state of design thinking in Namibia. This will help them understand how companies and other organisations employ creativity to develop new services, products and processes. Turipamwe is confident that the survey results will reveal to what extent Lean methods like Design Thinking are applied in campaigns.

“Turipamwe has serviced the corporate landscape, the public sector and civil society for over a decade”, said the agency’s Chief Executive and Creative Director, Tanya Stroh.

“In our work, we have come across an untapped market in supporting clients in strategy work and innovation facilitation. Most local companies currently seek this support abroad from South Africa or Europe, but we wanted to meet the demand with a local service,” she explained.

Supported by Growth Consultant Ms Auri Evokari, Turipamwe underwent a Lean Service Creation process last year and developed its new service Co-Create using the Design Thinking methodology. Over a nine-month period, the team mapped out the user needs, developed a prototype that was tested with users, finalised the design and launched the new service Co-Create.

“By the end of the year, we started to notice how the approach we took was changing our team’s mindset to be more experimental and creative, leading to better service delivery for our customers. We realised the power of design thinking and how our company processes needed to adjust to this new approach”, Stroh said.

According to Turipamwe, the innovation landscape in Namibia still has some way to go to be globally competitive. Based on the 2021 Global Innovation Index, Namibia is ranked 100 out of 132 countries. The Co-Create team decided that more awareness is needed to determine which organisations are considered innovative and how they do it.

Design thinking is a methodology that has been mainstreamed in management consultancy and innovation practices in the past 15 years, but it is still a novelty in Namibia. It provides a systematic approach to solving problems, and it is beneficial for tackling complex problems that are difficult to define or that remain undefined. “This is because it serves to understand the human needs involved, reframe the problem in human-centric ways and create numerous ideas to solve it,” she said.

“We are now calling for everyone in corporates, NGOs and the public sector to participate in our study through a survey on our website. We want to know whom Namibians consider innovative and who out here uses these methodologies that foster innovation. We value all your input on the subject matter, and you’re welcome to contact us should you be interested in contributing more,” said Donovan Majiedt, Head of Co-Create at Turipamwe.


 

About The Author

Mandisa Rasmeni

Mandisa Rasmeni has worked as reporter at the Economist for the past five years, first on the entertainment beat but now focussing more on community, social and health reporting. She is a born writer and she believes education is the greatest equalizer. She received her degree in Journalism at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) in June 2021. . She is the epitome of perseverance, having started as the newspaper's receptionist in 2013.