Design Your Business: A Creative Pathway to Transforming Ideas into Successful Products

This actionable and lively guide helps aspiring entrepreneurs to acquire a designer’s mindset to transform ideas into successful products, and designers and technologists to identify entrepeneurial opportunities through a unique mix of product and business development toolkits.

Unlike other books focusing either downstream on the launch of a new venture or upstream on ideation and the acquisition of an entrepreneurial mindset, Design Your Business helps innovators to cross the chasm between attractive ideas and actual products, a crucial test in any entrepreneurial endeavor and one which most innovative ideas do not pass. Throughout the book, readers will learn about methods, steps, and resources to unleash their creativity, understand users’ needs, build and test prototypes, and design beautiful products. At the end of this design journey, readers will find an essential business toolkit including business model design, intellectual property protection, funding, and development of effective communication skills that will help them to lay the foundation of a successful venture built around a successful product.

This book will become an essential and thought-provoking resource for aspiring entrepreneurs, makers, students of entrepreneurship and new venture creation, and professionals seeking to adopt a design mindset and agile project management in their projects and organizations.

Slides and teaching materials based on this book are curated from the authors and available for free at this link: https://elegantdesignthinking.com/category/learning-resources/

Luca Iandoli is Dean of the Collins College of Professional Studies at St. John’s University. Luca was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and served as associate professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and as visiting professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, USA. His research focuses on collective intelligence, interaction design, and design-driven entrepreneurship.

Kevin T. James is Director of Finance and Business Operations in the Office of Student Success and Enrollment Management at St. John’s University. Previously, he served as an Assistant Dean and Director of Fiscal and Administrative Affairs in the Collins College of Professional Studies at St. John’s University. He is currently a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on entrepreneurial leadership in education.