The Effectiveness of Design Thinking Approach in Teaching and Learning Innovation Skills

The Effectiveness of Design Thinking Approach in Teaching and Learning Innovation Skills

Chong “Joanna” S.K. Lee, California State University, CA., U.S.A.

Eunice, Y. Lee, Hayward Adult School, CA., U.S.A.

Innovation, as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage, is recognized as a key driver of growth in the 21st century economy. Organizations increasingly rely on innovation for their success in the constantly changing, globally competitive business environment. Innovation calls for a large number of people equipped with diverse skill sets that are not only conducive to continuous learning and change but also contribute to a multifaceted approach to business. Business programs need to do a better job in teaching and preparing students with innovation skills. A couple of important questions arise as we contemplate teaching innovation skills – what we need to teach and how we can teach them.

Innovation skills can be taught by focusing on the primary criteria that include creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration. In the process of learning to innovate, students need to be prepared to think creatively, work creatively with others, learn to implement innovations, reason effectively, use systems thinking, make judgement and decisions, solve problems, communicate clearly, and collaborate with others (Partnership For 21st Century Skills, 2015).

Hoidn and Karkkainen (2014) identify three overlapping set of skills necessary for innovation: Technical Skills, Thinking and Creativity Skills, and Social and Behavioral Skills. Of the Thinking and Creativity Skills, creativity is noted to be an important source of innovation. Innovation requires open-mindedness and critical questioning of well-established ideas or practices. While Technical Skills require specialist skills, Thinking and Creativity Skills and Social and Behavioral Skills require training in the way of questioning, thinking, listening, engaging, collaborating and communicating. Two out of three major categories of innovation skills identified by Hoidn and Karkkainen, Thinking and Creativity and Social and Behavioral Skills, are related to soft skills which are founded upon attitudinal and personal qualities of individuals such as open-mindedness, self-confidence, communication, and collaboration.

In a search of desirable soft skills for improving business education, employers perceive attitudinal qualities as important as widely accepted skills such as communication, problem solving, and analytical skills. For example, a study of marketing professionals found that employers looked for personal qualities such as openness, flexibility, and creativity as well as other desirable qualities such as communication, teamwork, and analytical and problem solving skills in marking hires (Lee, 2006). Another study identified listening skills and customer orientation as important factors for success in marketing career along with communication, analytical skills and tools, market research, and application skills (Walker et al., 2011). This implies that empathy, as the ability to listen to and relate with customers, is an important quality to employers as well as creativity, open-mindedness, communication, and teamwork. These are just some of the many desirable personal qualities related to the ability to innovate that companies value.

The new AACSB accreditation standards also encourage business schools to give more weight to teaching the soft skills going forward. It is noted that many of these soft skills are related to the ability to change and innovate. Essentially, attitudinal qualities of self-awareness, open-mindedness, flexibility, willingness to learn, and empathy reflect the necessary qualities of individuals and organizations in coping with changing business environments, which leads to continuous learning and to innovation.In order to meet the needs of employers, business educators must be actively engaged in fostering qualities of creativity, open-mindedness, flexibility, empathy, and confidence in students in addition to building the disciplinary competence and being mindful of instructional methods that will produce the desired outcomes. One of the challenges in this endeavor is identifying pedagogical methods that educators can use to help students develop these personal qualities and soft skills in the context of the topical interests.

Design Thinking to Teach Innovation Skills

In search of pedagogical process and tools to instill the innovation skills, the Design Thinking approach came across as a potentially effective way for a number of reasons. The Design Thinking approach has been increasingly recognized for its effectiveness in bringing out innovation and change in various sectors. Educational institutions and programs of various types and sizes have successfully incorporated Design Thinking to foster innovative leadership education. In addition, there seems to be a natural connection between the innovation skills and essential Design Thinking elements such as empathy, listening, collaboration, and experimentation.

Design Thinking is a process of creating and developing new and innovative ideas in order to solve problems (T. Brown 2008).According to Tim Brown, the CEO and the president of IDEO, Design Thinking is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match customers’ needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business can convert into customer value and market opportunity. In this matching process, Design Thinking combines empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights, and collaborations and rationality in analyzing and fitting various solutions to the problem context. Design Thinking, as a problem solving process, can have variations in specific number and labeling of steps, but by and large, go through the process of definition and research, ideation, prototyping, choosing, implementation, and learning. The entire cycle begins all over with the previous ending point becoming the beginning of the next iteration. The circular nature of the process enables managers to engage in continuous learning, which enables them to stay relevant in the changing business environment.

For the purpose of fostering innovative problem solving, the Design Thinking method was adopted as a pedagogical approach to teaching the graduate course on Innovative Brand Management. The course was developed with the goals to equip MBA students with a Design Thinking toolkit and to help them utilize the tools and processes in the context of innovative brand management. In addition, several aspects of Design Thinking seem especially appropriate for teaching a set of innovation soft skills such as empathy, flexibility, collaborative learning, and creativity.

The course, Design Thinking and Innovative Branding, was developed to provide a basic foundation of the principles of Design Thinking and to teach students how those principles can create innovative brands. This 10-week course wove Design Thinking and Branding together. Branding consisted of learning by key segments in branding: Identity vs. Image vs. Reputation; Leader vs. Challenger; The Value Proposition; Differentiation; Positioning; and Naming. Design Thinking elements worked through the six steps that include Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, and Refine. A number of student learning expectations identified include applying empathetic skills, using coaching/storytelling, working in teams/collaboration, understanding Design Thinking’s contribution to branding, and applying Design Thinking tools and process for team ideation, winnowing of ideas, building prototypes, and testing/refinement.

Students scored high in all of the course learning outcomes. To our surprise, students scored the highest on the course learning outcome, ‘Work in Teams/Collaboration.’ This course experience echoes the importance and the power of community collaboration as a benefit of the Design Thinking (T. Brown 2015). Reflecting on the course experience of students and the instructor, the Design Thinking approach proved to beeffective in teaching business students a number of important innovation skills such as empathy, open-mindedness, creative problem solving, experimentation, communication, and collaboration. In addition, by incorporating realism with community collaboration projects, Design Thinking can instill the lasting impact of confidence and process know-how while engaging students in hands-on, real-life, problem-solving projects.

The course experience indicated that Design Thinking effectively prepares students with a toolbox that offers a myriad of ways to equip students with techniques to make relevant change through their MBA career and their professional lives. This toolbox provides students with techniques in expanding their creative thinking, critical thinking, and problem solving skills while developing solutions that serve the greater good and their clients’ needs. Additionally, students believe that the Design Thinking tools and techniques truly teach them how to make a customer centric product through teamwork and collaborative creativity. The Design Thinking toolbox equips students with the knowledge of how to collaborate while also giving them a purpose set toward customer satisfaction.

Going forward, being encouraged by the positive pedagogical impact of this course, the Design Thinking approach has been adopted in a senior level undergraduate marketing elective course, expanded to an MBA workshop, and continuing as an MBA elective course. Considering its effectiveness in teaching soft skills and collaboration skills, Design Thinking can be used to develop soft skills from team building skills, to creative problem solving,and to diversity management skills. The Design Thinking approach can be used to facilitate the development of innovative skills with applications that are not strictly limited in one specific sector/industry.

REFERENCES

Brown, Tim (2008), “Design Thinking,” June 2008, Harvard Business Review,

Brown, Tim (2015), “Design Thinking: What We Can Learn from Barn Raisers”, January 16, 2015,

Ghannadian, F. Frank (2013), “What employers want and what we teach,” BizEd, March/April, 2013, pp. 40-44.

Hoidn, S. and K. Karkkainen (2014), “Promoting Skills for Innovation in Higher Education: A Literature Review on the Effectiveness of Problem-Based Learning and of Teaching Behaviors”, OECD Education Working Papers, No. 100, OECD Publishing,

Lee, Chong “Joanna” S. K. (2006). Marketing a department: One Chair’s Experience in Curriculum Revision, Journal for Advancement of Marketing Education, 9(1), 9-17.

Lee, Chong “Joanna” S. K. (2012), “The Rise, Fall, and Return of E-Marketing Curriculum: - A Call for Integration,” Business Education Innovation Journal, 4(1).

Partnership For 21st Century Skills (2015), “Learning and Innovation Skills,” P21 Framework Definitions,

Walker, Ian, Yelena Tsarenko, Peter Wagstaff, Irene Powell, Marion Steel, and Jan Brace- Govan (2011). “The Development of Competent Marketing Professionals,” Journal of Marketing Education, 31(3), 253-263.