Design Thinking for Business Innovation, University of Virginia

     It's funny the terms that materialize and trend in the business world. "Design Thinking" is another one of those terms. "Design Thinking is seen as offering a new approach better-suited for dealing with the accelerating pressures for growth and innovation faced by so many organizations today." The process for Design Thinking involves asking four questions:

• The current reality (what is?);
• The envisioning of a new future (what if?);
• The development of some concepts for new business opportunities (what wows?); and
• The testing of some of those concepts in the marketplace (what works?).

      Design Thinking follows a process of rapid prototyping and playtesting to come up with products that fill needs for specific markets. This is not something that is new, companies like Apple have just slapped a new name on it and brought it to the public's attention. My company follows a nearly identical process which we mostly refer to as "iterative design." We are constantly adjusting the product throughout the development cycle, essentially meaning that we are never "done" developing. In my opinion it does not matter which of these trends you grab onto, as long as your organization makes a thoughtful plan and sticks to it.
     The University of Virginia's class on Design Thinking is a very high level course, but students still walk away with several tools for developing and marketing new products. The ethnography and storytelling tools for example teach students how to market business solutions in a memorable way and how to properly test those solutions with the target market.
     I do wish they spiced up the presentation of the material a little bit. Class lecture videos were mostly made of a single professor talking in front of a green screen for varying amounts of time. Sometimes industry professionals would give examples of how they used the tools presented in the course. I have been part of other courses that interrupt lectures to test the student's understanding of the presented material. This at least gives the student a little bit of interaction with the material (outside of homework assignments). With that said, I was able to relate to much of what was being presented. I recommend this course as a casual reminder of how to properly plan and execute new solutions for the everyday business professional. Take the class for free here!