What is it about?
Design thinking offers a complementary approach to the rational problem-solving methods typically emphasized in business schools. Business school instructors may perceive design thinking, a relatively new and complex multistep, iterative process, to be beyond their capabilities or time/resource constraints. This experiential exercise provides a relatively easy, low-investment approach to incorporating an overview of design thinking into any course. With minimal instructor preparation, participants can have a positive experience using design thinking to solve a real problem, consuming as little as an hour of class time. This activity is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in any business discipline. The provided lesson plan, slides, and workbook make it easy to facilitate students’ experience of the design thinking process.
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Why is it important?
In today’s economy, employers want people who can learn over time and solve complex problems. Business schools have been criticized for not adequately preparing students for the complex, rapidly changing businesses environment they will face. Recently, researchers have argued that design thinking offers business schools a means of addressing their perceived deficits (e.g., too lecture and case focused, inadequate opportunities to learn by doing, over reliance on rational analysis). Design thinking, which emphasizes the user need, delays search for the solution until the user need is understood, encourages learning through iterative prototyping and feedback, and embraces a bias toward action, offers a complementary approach to the rational/analytical problem-solving methods typically emphasized in business schools. Today, design thinking is recognized and embraced as a successful problem-solving method, a method that melds an end-user focus with multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative experimentation to achieve desirable, user-friendly, and economically viable solutions or innovations.
Perspectives
This activity is appropriate for almost any adult audience in almost any context. I have successfully used this activity with undergraduate and graduate students in organizational behavior, strategic planning, and innovation/entrepreneurship courses and with peers in a professional development context. I have also used it as a stand-alone workshop for graduate and undergraduate students, professionals/colleagues, and combinations of these audiences. This versatile, engaging activity may be used in any course or situation where the instructor wants to introduce participants to design thinking and expose them to a creative, exploratory approach to problem solving.
Dr Mary Kuchta Foster
Morgan State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Design Thinking: A Creative Approach to Problem Solving, Management Teaching Review, August 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2379298119871468.
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