Article
The Kind of Creative Thinking That Fueled…
WeChat, the messaging app, dominates daily life in China. We conducted an in-depth study of the company, through exclusive interviews with 15 executives, including founder Allen Zhang. We argue that WeChat’s success wasn’t achieved through technological superiority, but through the vision – or grand design – of Zhang. We explore how the grand design approach to innovation – where a new product or service emerges fully-formed in the mind’s eye of the innovator before it is developed and commercialized – can be more effective than design thinking under certain circumstances, most notably when a market is in its early formative stage of development
Original language: English
WeChat, the messaging app, dominates daily life in China. We conducted an in-depth study of the company, through exclusive interviews with 15 executives, including founder Allen Zhang. We argue that WeChat’s success wasn’t achieved through technological superiority, but through the vision – or grand design – of Zhang. We explore how the grand design approach to innovation – where a new product or service emerges fully-formed in the mind’s eye of the innovator before it is developed and commercialized – can be more effective than design thinking under certain circumstances, most notably when a market is in its early formative stage of development