The first Design Sprint in Beirut, organized by Google Launchpad, Berytech, ESCWA and BCC, will take place on 26-27 October 2015, at Berytech Technology & Health, in Mathaf.

Developed at Google Ventures, the sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Design Sprints are a framework for teams of any size to solve and test design problems in 2 days, being the “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, teams get great data from a prototype. This gives these companies a superpower: the ability to build and test nearly any idea in just 40 hours. You can watch the video here. The usual framework goes like this:

On Monday, entrepreneurs unpack the problem.
On Tuesday, they sketch competing solutions on paper.
On Wednesday, they decide how to turn their idea into a testable hypothesis.
On Thursday, they hammer out a high-fidelity prototype.
On Friday, they finally test it

From Google Ventures 

GV desigron partner Jake Knapp began running design sprints at Google in 2010. He worked with teams like Chrome, Google Search and Google X. In 2012, Jake brought sprints to Google Ventures, and the rest of the team chipped in their expertise to perfect the process.

Braden Kowitz added story-centered design, an unconventional approach that focuses on the customer journey instead of individual features or technologies. Michael Margolis took customer research — which can typically take weeks to plan and often delivers confusing results — and figured out a way to get crystal clear results in just one day. John Zeratsky helped us start at the end, and focus on measuring results with the key metrics from each business. And Daniel Burka brought firsthand expertise as an entrepreneur to ensure every step made sense in the real world.