
According to the Design Thinking and Creativity for Business course of INSEAD an Innovation Catalyst is someone […] “who can identify a relevant opportunity to create value, find novel ways to address such an opportunity, and refine iteratively, ways to implement a plan to take action”.
Design Thinking is a business process suitable to assist managers, leaders and owners in addressing business challenges that are related to customer experience and usually focus on a product or service. Applying Design Thinking to a specific project or company entails and cultivates skills that lead to developing empathy for the end user and uncovering meaningful innovation opportunities. Tom and David Kelley of IDEO - in their book Creative Confidence - note the importance of empathy with clients, users, and customers as the basis for innovative design.
Design Thinking is a five step iterative process:
_Empathise: learning about the audience and developing an understanding of the challenge;
_Define: clearly articulating the problem you plan to solve;
_Ideate: brainstorm and create potential solutions;
_Prototype: build –quick and cheap- mock-ups of one or more ideas to test the solution;
_Test: test ideas, gain user feedback, continuously improve the design.

Zurich Orangerie and Bonsai Garten is a pleasant garden in the middle of the city of Zurich that is dedicated to growing and exhibiting bonsai trees. The site benefits from two small listed buildings and a relaxing landscape that includes a Japanese garden and fish pond. The new venue operators applied Design Thinking methodology in order to define the new products and services that will be offered in the space, as of June 2021.

Customer experience design: placing and picking a product on supermarket shelves [project for Walkers, PepsiCo, UK, 2008]
Spitogatos.gr is Greece's No.1 real estate website, with more than 750,000 properties to buy or rent, available to over 1.5 million visitors generating 54 million page views a month. It was founded in 2006.
Spitogatos.gr was the first Greek online startup to raise growth capital from venture capital fund Oxygen Capital in 2009. Since 2014 it has become part of Real Web, which controls Immobiliare.it, the No.1 real estate website in Italy. Julie became the marketing manager of Spitogatos.gr at the time of the venture capital funding in 2009, until 2010.
A good part of the marketing manager’s tasks was to draft the business requirements for any new/updated product, promotion or webpage. Analysing, developing and testing different options for the property listings was of vital importance to the visitors of Spitogatos.gr. A driving force behind each new product design was to improve end user experience and to provide more targeted content on view property page for the end user. A design thinking approach was adopted for the development of every new product in the strart-up.



