Design Thinking Applied to Data Storage Innovation: A Case Study

This paper presents part of a larger study that seeks to investigate the potential of the Design Thinking (DT) approach when applied to innovation processes especially on product and service development in the ICT industry. In particular, the DT approach is applied to the case study of a backup and storage service as a distributed, fog-computing infrastructure. Its functionality is based on sharing the available disk storage of personal and organizational devices. The case study presents the process of applying the DT approach and the way this can contribute not just to improve the solution in terms of customer desirability and market viability, but also the collaborative way of current technological design process. In particular, the DT approach, apparently hard, fuzzy and time consuming during the initial steps of the design process, proved successful in studying the relationship between the value propositions and the target clients of the innovative data storage service. A first co-design session helped to understand that the most important features enabled by the fog-computing paradigm, such as data security and privacy could be more valuable for a corporate context; thus the proposed solution shifted to a Business-to-Business (B2B) model. Other co-design sessions helped better understanding the service value proposition and final users.