Design Thinking and Creativity: Analyzing Uber's Business Challenges

This report delves into the application of design thinking principles within Uber, a prominent transportation network company. It begins with an introduction to design thinking and its significance in the modern business environment, using Uber as a case study. The report explores new forms of creativity, specifically proposing the "UberShopper" concept, a service designed to enhance the customer experience by suggesting shopping locations and itineraries. It identifies potential sources for this creativity, such as customer needs and tourism, while also acknowledging potential blocks like technological limitations and employee engagement. Various creativity-stimulating techniques, including mind mapping, customer co-creation, learning lunches, and journey mapping, are discussed in the context of UberShopper. Furthermore, the report analyzes the forms of innovation applicable to Uber, recommending disruptive innovation to introduce new services to the existing market. The conclusion summarizes the key findings, emphasizing Uber's commitment to innovation and the potential of design thinking to address business challenges and enhance customer satisfaction.

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DESIGN THINKING AND CREATIVITY
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5/8/2019

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Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
New forms of creativity...................................................................................................................3
Potential source(s) for this creativity...............................................................................................3
Potential blocks for the organization’s creativity initiatives...........................................................4
Creativity stimulating techniques....................................................................................................5
Forms of innovation used to facilitate creativity in this organization.............................................7
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................11
References......................................................................................................................................12

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Introduction
Design thinking is a technique or procedure for solving problem with creativity. The process
uses various elements like experimentation and empathy from designer’s toolkit to attain
innovative solutions. It includes five stage processes initiating from empathies, define, ideate,
prototype, and ends at testing. In dynamic modern business environment, innovation is an
important element that has to be considered by organizations to gain competitive advantage
(Liedtka, 2018).
For the discussion, Uber organizational case will be considered, for which a creative problem
solving will be included. Uber technologies is a California based transportation network
company which is offering ride service hailing, peer to peer ridesharing, bicycle sharing system
and food delivery. The company is serving in 785 metropolitan arrears globally (uber, 2019).
The company is serving various nations and needs to grow their business through creative
problem solving that will be discussed in report further.

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New forms of creativity
The company is one of the most innovative companies, and considers technology as the key for
innovation. For creative idea generation that the company is not doing currently would be
UberShopper. As per this innovative idea, the company offers shopping day out with Uber as per
customer shopping preference. Customers can add the products they are willing to purchase and
Uber can suggest the relevant places nearby in the city and can take customers as per the
scheduled shopping place for the whole day or based on hours. The company has been providing
ride for shopping when customers add the place where they want to go, but in the new innovative
service, the company will suggest the places to go and help customer schedule their day and
route for shopping whole list (Ahlin, 2014).
Potential source(s) for this creativity
The more relevant source would be customer need identification. In case an individual or group
of people are visiting a city for shopping purpose and are willing to purchase four or five
different categories of products like clothing, furniture, kids fashion and many more in a day. If
they are doing by themselves they need to check out the relevant places in the city from search
engines or from people suggestion, they need to plan which place to visits first as per the route to
do shopping in most organized way and utilize time properly. This can be done with the click
from customer’s phone; and this customer needs, justify the source for the creativity. Moreover,
wedding shopping in various nations are a crucial aspect to be done. This also justify this new
service by the company, as there are generally large number of products involve in the shopping

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and in case of working men and women, they can spend a day or two for shopping purpose,
which makes UberShopper more relevant product and service (Amabile & Rigolizzo, 2015).
Another major source would be one of the customer segments that are travelers or tourism.
People vising different places to travel and for entertainment purpose are generally interested in
shopping in the city but are unaware about the places to visits for shopping purpose, which
UberShopper can make easy (Biemans, 2018).
Potential blocks for the organization’s creativity initiatives
The building blocks of Uber would include some of the potential elements that would be
required for the creativity to implement by the company. The appropriate elements would be
analyzed below:
 Technology
One of the key elements in innovation in case of Uber is technology, as the company is
formed based on technological innovation. Technology for the innovative service idea
discussed in previous section would require latest technology and change in technology.
Technology is the strong asset for Uber Inc. However, for this service development new
technology would be require that would be appropriate to search for the relevant and
popular places and software to schedule the appropriate route and plan for the day from a
list of products to be purchased by the customers (Camison & Fores, 2016).
 Availability of resources
The resources in form of raw material, software’s, vehicles would be essential for
implementation of UberShopper. The resources availability for Uber is good as the
company is already using various software to make customer experience better and user

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friendly. However, the company would require large resources due to increase in services
like Uber cars need to be increased, and so do the human resources (Bruns, 2013).
 Employee engagement
While serving such services, which depend largely on customization and customer
preference, the employees serving the employees play major role. The company majorly
targets the customer through helping employees and making traveling comfortable,
however UberShopper would require better employee engagement for innovative service
providing (Alves & Sousa, 2018).
Creativity stimulating techniques
There is various creativity stimulating techniques that can be used while analyzing design
thinking. The most appropriate tools for UberShopper would include
1. Mind mapping
Mind mapping tool is one of the majorly used tool for complex problem solving which
include conceptual thinking activity that would involve entering an inventing or central
idea and its related ideas, which will disseminated from the center. For Uber, to get onto
a better and innovative problem solving, mind mapping found to be relevant which would
include analyzing the problem like customers problem in finding relevant places at new
place for shopping. Data is collected, and risk is identified that is involve in the
innovation like technological degradation of breakdown would be large risk involved in
UberShopper. Moreover, teamwork is done, as mentioned in previous section; employee
engagement in this innovation is very relevant. In addition, after testing the decision, it is

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finally decided is this creative problem solving is to be selected or not (Coulson-Thomas,
2017).
Figure 1: Mind mapping process (Source: (Biemans, 2018)
2. Customer co creation
Customer co creation is another technique for stimulating creativity that is suitable for
Uber technologies. Customer co creation is engaging potential customers to develop new
ideas for the company. In case of Uber technologies, the customer’s problems are
understood, as they are searching for places and need to visit different places in a day and
ask them what they are expecting from the company to serve to solve their problem. This
cannot be interchangeable with customization, but it is a participatory design to ensure if
the customer would prefer this innovative product or service to opt. Therefore, it can be
said that for Uber it can be easy for the company to understand customer and innovate

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product as per that which result into UberShopper and offer creation would be attractive
for customers (Huggins & Thompson, 2015).
3. Learning launches
Learning lunches are the technique of design thinking and are like experiments that are to
be conducted in marketplace inexpensively and quickly. This would include testing the
launch of UberShopper and learning launch’s success. This tool is use to make customer
feel that it is real to customers and to launcher as well, this is to understand if actually the
customer are in need of or not and is the product launch be attractive to customers or not.
This would also practically analyze the risk involved by Uber technologies, like noyt able
to understand the customer’s requirement for shopping due to cultural barriers like
language issue (Dewald & Osiyevskyy, 2015).
4. Journey mapping
This is also known to be the experience mapping that involves tracing the journey of the
customer’s in the process of service received, while employees observing and paying
attention towards the emotional lows and highs and studying customers to understand
their points and pains and search for the innovation to reduce the low points and enhance
the high points. For Uber technologies, the services revived by the customer to reach to
the place they want were the high points. However, searching the right place to go or
visits while taking the Uber transportation facility were considered as low points. This
could result into innovative idea of UberShopper (Choi & Park, 2016).

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Forms of innovation used to facilitate creativity in this organization
Macro environmental factors would include factors like culture of the nation, political
environment of the nation, economical, technological, and legal factors. Since Uber technologies
is an international company and serving across various metropolitan areas, the macro
environmental factors would affect the forms of innovation for Uber to facilitate creativity. For
instance, the political environment of company would affect in the way that the government
would support the company to offer the products in country or not (Procter, 2014). Moreover,
technological environment of the nation reflects the available infrastructure to support the
technological innovation and the cultural factors to ensure if the technological adaptability is
high for the success of technological advanced products and services (Jesus, 2015). There are
four possible forms of innovation depending upon the market and level of technology to innovate
1. Architectural innovation
Architectural innovation is targeting new market with existing technology. This would
include entering into new market with existing technology but new for the nation; for
example, Uber entering India for Uber transportation and brining innovation through use
of technology in nation. This would be impacted by the technological and various other
macro environmental factors to enter and get technology supported by nations’
infrastructure (Dawood, 2015).
2. Radical innovation
Radical innovation is use or development of new technology for new market to target.
This would include a new product development with technological innovation (Liedtka &
Ogilivie, 2011).
3. Incremental innovation

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Incremental innovation would include use of existing technology to the existing market,
while enhance the value to the customers. This would include affecting technological
factors of the nation to bring changes through designs and features change (Tidd &
Bessant, 2013).
4. Disruptive innovation
Disruptive innovation from the innovation tool matrix below lies in the grid, which
involves new technological innovation, offered to the existing market. This would
include development of new product of development with technological innovation and
offered to the existing market of the company (Ding, 2018).
For Uber technologies, the recommended form of innovation would be Disruptive innovation
form, the reason being the company’s creative problem solving idea is to develop UberShopper.
This would introduce the current market with new product. The target market would be the
customers already using Uber transportation facilities and would prefer to use new services
offered by the company (Weisberg, 2006).

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Figure 2: Form of innovation (source: (Camison & Fores, 2016)

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Conclusion
From the discussion it can be concluded Uber technologies is a California based transportation
network company which is offering ride service hailing, peer to peer ridesharing, bicycle sharing
system and food delivery. For creative idea generation that the company is not doing currently
was “UberShopper.” As per this innovative idea, the company offers shopping day out with Uber
as per customer shopping preference. Customers can add the products they are willing to
purchase and Uber can suggest the relevant places nearby in the city and can take customers as
per the scheduled shopping place for the whole day or based on hours.
Potential source(s) for this creativity were customer need identification like people visiting a city
for shopping purpose, one of the customer segments that are travelers or tourism are the major
potential source and occasions like wedding shopping in various nations could be another
potential source for idea generation. Potential blocks for the organization’s creativity initiatives
were availability of resources, technology, and employee engagement. There was various
creativity stimulating techniques that can be used while analyzing design thinking. The most
appropriate tools for UberShopper would include mind mapping, learning launches, customer co
creation, and journey mapping.