Design Thinking Blog

Overview of Post: This post from the Innoversity Site looks at the highlights from a talk by George Kembel on the topic of using Design Thinking to innovate.

Thoughts on Post: Good notes from a rather long talk.  The notes are worth the read even if you don’t view the video.

A great talk by George Kembel of the Stanford D.School is available to watch online, so here are a few highlights from the talk that we find interesting here at Innoversity:

The d.school is the means of connecting different faculties in Stanford University. Students work in teams on real challenges with engineers, business students, designers and other varied disciplines on campus. They learn the design thinking process which is usually this:

empathy > define > ideate > prototype > test

Teams are not given a defined problem, based on the belief that half of businesses fail not because they didn’t solve the problem, but because they solved the wrong problem. Read the rest of this entry »

“These thinkers have their feet firmly planted in the practical world, can stretch their heads to the clouds—and simultaneously span all of the space in between”

By Bill Buxton

It has become almost a cliché to say that cross-disciplinary teams are a key component for successful innovation. If certain problems are beyond the scope of any individual—and most of them are—the way to address them is with a team with complementary skills and a common language in which they can all communicate. So far so good. But useful guidance starts to dry up rather quickly beyond that. Since there is no reliable secret formula that can be used by a hiring manager or someone trying to build up appropriate skill sets, I thought that I would share a way of thinking that I have found really useful.

There may be no “I” in team, but every team needs to be made up of “I-shaped” people. Read the rest of this entry »