Recently, I had the opportunity to take the Design Thinking Action Lab course from Stanford University and it really helped to concertize the process of developing a solution to a wicked problem through the process of design thinking.
Empathize - Understand your target consumer and understand the world from his perspective, get into his shoes to understand his pain.
Define - Define his problem
Ideate - Think 50 ideas to solve his problem, practical ideas, cost effective ideas, ideas with unlimited resource availability, ideas with minimal changes, ideas with drastic changes and BLUE-SKY ideas - out of the world crazy ideas. Important thing to remember when ideating don't put your critical thinking hat and stop/obstruct the generation of ideas. If you are doing this in your teams don't be critical as it will stop the ideas flow. Filtering of ideas can be done later but this is the phase to open the flood gates and let the ideas flood you.
After you have listed all your ideas, pick the top 3 - Practical, Favorite and Most Disruptive.
Prototype or Pretotype - This is the stage when you basically, take your top 3 ideas and do a quick prototype or pretotype. The idea is to have a cost effective way to validate a concept.
Test - Get your target customer feedback on your idea prototype and revise it if needed.
