Rose’s business challenge
Fed up with seeing the streets and sewers of her city littered with plastic, Rose launched a service that supermarkets can use to have their plastic waste collected instead of throwing it away. Rose’s service then sorts the different plastics and sells them to recycling plants for a small profit.
After several months of activity, Rose’s business is struggling and she still sees plastic waste in the streets. Delays in payments from recycling plants, new government policies and competition from informal waste collectors are all challenges she didn’t plan for. Rose realises she wasn’t aware of the broader ecosystem around her new service and how it could affect the success of her business.
How Rose used Design Thinking to overcome her business challenge
Determined to succeed, Rose takes a design thinking approach to explore the problem that her service seeks to solve in a new way. She asks herself, “What is the change I want to make?” and “Why is my service important to me and to my community?”
Rose conducts observations to gain more insights into the problem of plastic litter in her city. She pays close attention to people’s behaviour, from when they throw plastic on the ground to the areas that are the most polluted. She takes pictures of what she sees.
She then maps out her pictures and starts to notice patterns. For example, most people throw plastic on the ground while waiting in traffic and near bus stops. She realises that her waste collection service could be expanded beyond just supermarkets to streets and public transport.
Rose crafts a new vision for her business: a city where everyone takes responsibility for pollution-free, clean and pleasant public spaces.
Rose’s problem and vision are now clear and defined, but it is a complex problem to solve. This does not stop her. She uses the iceberg exercise from this track to map out the different actors and structural systems underlying her problem. This gives Rose a broad overview of the different causes and social, economic and political triggers of her problem, as well as the key stakeholders involved.
Rose reviews her systems map and highlights the key stakeholders she can connect with to pivot and scale her service.
Today, Rose is building new partnerships and her plastic collection service is in high demand. Thanks to her agility and design thinking mindset, her start-up is gaining market share and overtaking the competition.
