National Incubation Center Peshawar is hosting a curriculum session on Design Thinking for its Cohort 15 founders, led by Bilal Ahmad from Precision Medicine Lab, a Netherlands-based precision medicine and healthcare technology organization. The session is designed to give founders a structured introduction to one of the most consequential methodologies in modern product and service development, equipping them with the tools to move beyond assumption-driven building and into a more rigorous, user-grounded approach to identifying problems and developing solutions. Whether participants are refining an existing product or working through the early stages of building something entirely new, the session provides a framework for engaging with the people a product is designed to serve in ways that produce insight rather than simply confirmation of what a founder already believes.
Design Thinking as a discipline is built around a deceptively simple insight that is nonetheless routinely ignored in the pressure and excitement of early-stage building, which is that the most important thing to understand before building a solution is the problem the solution is meant to address, and that understanding that problem requires genuine engagement with the people experiencing it rather than the founder’s own projection of what their experience must be like. Many startups invest significant time, energy, and capital building products that solve the problem they imagined their users had rather than the problem their users actually have, and the divergence between those two things is often only discovered after the product has been built and taken to market. Design Thinking is the methodology that surfaces that divergence early, when the cost of adjustment is low, rather than late, when it has become a crisis.
Bilal Ahmad brings to the session a perspective shaped by work at Precision Medicine Lab, an organisation operating at the intersection of medical science, data, and technology where the consequences of building solutions that do not precisely address the actual problem are particularly significant. In healthcare and precision medicine, the discipline of deeply understanding the user, whether that user is a patient, a clinician, or a healthcare system administrator, before designing an intervention is not merely good practice but a foundational requirement. That rigour, translated into the startup context through the lens of Design Thinking, gives founders attending the session access to a standard of user-centred problem solving that is shaped by one of the most demanding application domains the methodology is applied in.
The session will move founders through the core stages of the Design Thinking process, beginning with uncovering user needs through empathy-driven research and observation rather than assumption, and progressing through the validation of the assumptions that founders bring to their ventures and the development of solutions that are grounded in what users actually value and need. For Cohort 15 participants who are at the stage of building and refining their ventures, the session offers a practical recalibration of how they approach the relationship between their product and the people it is built for, giving them tools they can apply immediately to the decisions they are making about product direction, feature prioritisation, and market positioning.
NIC Peshawar’s continued investment in curriculum sessions that address the foundational disciplines of venture building reflects its understanding that the quality of the founders it produces is determined as much by the depth and breadth of the learning experiences it provides as by the incubation infrastructure it offers. The Design Thinking session with Bilal Ahmad sits within a broader curriculum that spans legal, financial, strategic, and operational dimensions of startup development, and is supported by the centre’s institutional partners including Ignite, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, LMKT, LMKR, Sybrid, Orbit Startups, Institute of Management Sciences, Rehman Medical Institute, CECOS University, and Frontier Platinum.
Follow the SPIN IDG WhatsApp Channel for updates across the Smart Pakistan Insights Network covering all of Pakistan’s technology ecosystem.
