Laboratory for Design-Thinking of HSE Graduate School of Business and ‘Perekrestok’ Retail Chain Held a Series of Seminars on Design Thinking for Bachelor’s Students
Laboratory for Design-Thinking of HSE Graduate School of Business and ‘Perekrestok’ Retail Chain held a special course on design thinking for students. During the course, over 400 listeners worked for 6 weeks on new products and services for improving 'Perekrestok' chain’s customer experience.
A team of 11 mentors, involving experts and practitioners from leading companies like PWC, Gazprom Neft, Sberbank, SIBUR, and others, supported the students. Students studied retail chain customers’ demands and developed non-obvious, even innovative solutions and participated in their further prototyping. As a result, students introduced 58 projects to business partners, who selected 14 of them as the most well-designed and perspective for implementation.
Students suggested many unusual ideas, such as product presets for the online store, a system of face recognition for automated calculation of the customer’s discount, voice search of products, and many more.
The design thinking methodology is based on understanding the relevant demands of customers to improve their shopping experience. Design thinking is a creative process that allows broadening horizons and finding the most non-obvious solutions.