"Necessity is the mother of invention" - Product concept and design thinking

Ideas don't always come with creativity. Ideas are sometimes created out of pure necessity. On a cold winter evening in Germany, amidst the black forest, my friend and I were walking towards the car, to drive back home after our MBA class. Well, little did we know that it was going to take us 20 minutes to spot where the car was. Everything was covered in snow. We somehow spotted the car, which then needed ice-scraping for the next 20 minutes. All done, we drove from there to the spot where she drops me off and we needed to repeat the exercise, for me to spot my car. This was the starting point for our product concept. This is where I shouted, "why can't someone just find a robot that scrapes ice". Why should I just freeze in cold. There are robots for everything, so why not to scrape ice? Earlier that day, our beloved professor had instructed us to find a new idea and make it into a product concept. Well, there we were. We started by segmenting our market, writing our value proposition, then chartered our mission statement, arrived at the product concept description stage where we decided to design a first prototype. Our colleague, who was working at a 3D printing company was kind enough to 3D print our ice-scraper robot. Last but not the least, we laid out the pricing strategy and our proposal to test the product in different phases. To put everything that I just described into two words, it is called Design Thinking.