Design Innovation & Design Thinking Resource Guide: Course & Video Resources: Design Innovation & Design Thinking

January 4, 2013 - The term 'design thinking' refers to incorporating human behavior into design. David Kelley and his Silicon Valley company IDEO have used this approach to create some of the world's most iconic products, including the computer mouse for Apple.

Program Highlights The false premise of the "creatives" vs. the "non-creatives." How a bias to action rather than a reflex for planning speeds successes. How to achieve a structure that makes the creative process sustainable. David Kelley's human-centered "design thinking" requires building empathy for the end-users of whatever product, service or environment you are creating. This empathy helps you understand users' needs and gives you the motivation to make their lives better. But empathy alone is not enough. If you want to innovate routinely, you must have a process. And you must be mindful of your process so you can improve upon it every time you go through it. Kelley acknowledges that development of analytical skills is still required, but believes our creative side has been underserved in traditional education and business environments. He describes how "guided mastery," a bias toward action, early prototyping, and waiting to plan until after you have the idea, are secrets that lead to successfully creative teams and innovative companies. David Kelley is distinguished not only as the founder and head of Stanford's Institute of Design, or "d.school," but also as the founder and chair of IDEO, a worldwide leader in business innovation processes and user-centered design.

Design & Thinking is a documentary exploring the idea of "design thinking." How do we fully engage organizations to think about the changing landscape of business, culture and society? Inspired by design thinking, this documentary grabs businessman, designers, social change-makers and individuals to portrait what they have in common when facing this ambiguous 21st century. What is design thinking? How is it applied in business models? How are people changing the world with their own creative minds? It is a call to the conventional minds to change and collaborate. Rather than a salute to the beauty of design, the film aims to bring forward the ambiguity, conflicts, and the messy process of how not just designers, but also creative people, think and do things. Change-making organizations like Code for America and stood alongside local bike shop, biology PhD and Coca-Cola, providing real-world inspirations of what designers call design thinking. Design thinking thought leaders such as David Kelley, Bill Moggridge and Tim Brown share their beliefs as skeptics progress the movie in a thought-provoking fashion. Trying to ask right questions, they all seem to agree, is more important then providing firm answers, as is expressed in this documentary.

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and director of research in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Amabile and Goleman detail the latest research behind creativity and innovation and how leaders can drive these critical factors in any organization by creating and growing positive inner work lives for employees. This hour long video includes five sections: Creativity And Innovation; Managing For Creativity; How To Optimize The Creative Environment; Motivating Creativity; Developing Your Own Creativity

What kind of leadership is needed when innovation is your competitive advantage? From her research on companies that have achieved breakthrough innovations, Professor Hill found a common leadership approach. Leaders at Pixar, eBay Germany, Google, HCL Technologies, and IBM, among others, build communities of people who are both "willing and able to innovate." They develop willing teams by pulling people together with a shared purpose, values, and rules of engagement. And they build capabilities by fostering intellectual diversity and debate (creative abrasion), high experimentation (creative agility), and integrative rather than compromise-driven solutions (creative resolution).

The DVD is broken up into three sections. Part 1 is "Brand Strategy," where you will learn what it takes to create a charismatic brand. Part 2 is "Design Thinking," where if you want to innovate, you have got to design. In Part 3, "Non-Stop Innovation," you will learn how a culture of innovation can deliver sustainable profits.

Explore our complex relationship with manufactured objects and the people who design them. OBJECTIFIED is a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It's about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. Through verite footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world's most influential product designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Continue to spur your creative development - this time from the perspective of a designer. You'll learn the principles of the design-thinking process (including reframing, ideating, and user understanding); explore the benefits of foresight scenarios, prototyping, and solution enactments; and discover how best to leverage the power of design thinking's user-centered approach.

Successful innovations must be desirable to consumers, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view. But how do you meet these requirements? Tim Brown advocates using the three stages of "design thinking": inspiration, ideation, and implementation. For inspiration, innovators must look at the world through the eyes and the ears of users, perhaps studying analogous situations or extreme users to spark a generative process. Ideation, the core of the process, involves prototyping and realistic testing. Implementation begins with storytelling to bring the idea into the world.