Empathy to responsible decisions: design thinking in nascent business models

Purpose This paper examines how design thinking journeys support responsible design decisions in nascent business to business (B2B) and business to consumers (B2C) business models in a pre-market phase. It addresses how patterns of sequence, emphasis and iteration across the five phases (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test) relate to the quality and timeliness of design decisions and how problem framing clarity shapes prototype fidelity and the quality of behavioural evidence used to decide. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a qualitative multiple-case design. It analyses 43 nascent service business models, each developed by MBA teams from a Graduate School in Peru working with real users, high-fidelity prototypes and pre-market tests. Using embedded case logic and replication (literal and theoretical), the paper combines rubric-based coding of the five design thinking phases with cross-case pattern matching and explanation building. Findings Most teams traverse all five phases, but only a subset exhibits “high balanced chains” in which empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing all reach high levels; these journeys are associated with more timely, well-grounded design decisions. Problem framing clarity is consistently linked to higher prototype fidelity but only weakly to the intensity and quality of behavioural evidence: good problems often lead to good prototypes, yet not to strong experimentation. A high-alignment cluster combines clear problems, appropriate prototype fidelity and multiple behavioural experiments. Originality/value The paper integrates process-level evidence on design thinking journeys with the notion of responsible design decisions in nascent business models, showing that responsibility hinges on aligned problem–prototype–evidence chains rather than on the mere adoption of design thinking tools.