Lead Users and Design Sprints: Building Relations Between Spaces in Product Development

Design knowledge has been conceptualized as a resilient relationship between problem and solution spaces. In innovative product development, though, the problem space is unknown at worst or ambiguous at best and it can be difficult move design knowledge into the solution space. We pursue solutions for this by combining short, intensive design undertakings called “design sprints” with the method of “lead users”. We show how formalized design principles from the lead user method and the design sprint method can be extracted, defined, and executed on by applying them to a case setting of climate solutions as innovations. We contribute with both knowledge on the problem as well as on the potential solution through a hexagonal map in a way that aids designers to better understand the resilient relationship between problem and solution spaces. We further contribute to theoretical knowledge by showing how researchers can make transparent the inferences from problem space to solution space.