Teaching entrepreneurship with a focus on Design Thinking: What does that mean?

We focused approach #3 in Entrepreneurship & Leadership, a required first-year class I taught in Spanish, at the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile. We challenged students to invent new toys that help to solve real-world problems, though brainstorming, user research, prototyping, in-person testing and more.

These skills are not easy to teach in a classroom setting, since students (especially students in their first semester of university) are accustomed to having the right answers come straight from the teacher and book.

Heidi Neck from Babson College, a school renowned for its entrepreneurship programs, that has partnered with the Universidad del Desarrollo, describes these core skills like this.

Entrepreneurial leaders “need the skills and the knowledge to define the world rather than be defined by it. To achieve this, entrepreneurial leaders must identify, assess, and shape opportunities in a variety of contexts—ranging from the predictable to the unknowable. They use creative and innovative approaches to create value for stakeholders and society. They create opportunities using a method of observing, acting, reflecting, and learning that is a constant and ongoing process.” [more]

This process is sometimes called design thinking: using the tools of design to get past uncertainty and ambiguity.

Essentially design thinking is getting out of the building, going out and talking to people that are facing the situations you want to address.

It’s about taking a big idea and making it gradually and iteratively more concrete through testing, improvisation, putting yourself out there in the real world.

Thinking like a designer is really about dialogue. Design is a tool for problem solving. 

This article is adapted from an interview I did with Anjanette, an expert on HoneIt. Click here to listen to the full interview. 

Notes: Design thinking as a discipline comes out of Stanford d.School and IDEO. “Get out of the building” is a phrase from Steve Blank. My parents worked in Ghana on a Stanford program where they used these tools with local entrepreneurs. I took the above on Universidad del Desarrollo campus in June of last year. It’s gorgeous after the rain!