As part of the orientation for the full-time MBAs at the UBC Sauder School of Business the students and faculty participated in the Design Thinker Workshop.
Design Thinker:Experience Innovation is a 3.5 hour workshop which is the product of a collaboration between Experience Point (HQ in Toronto) and IDEO, a global innovation and design firm that uses design thinking to create positive impact for business and society. Here is the link:
http://www.experiencepoint.com/sims/DesignThinker
The Design Thinker is an educational game and I think functioned very well as an introduction to design thinking for our MBAs.
Design Thinker provides meaningful experience with design thinking — you will compete to solve a realistic and complex challenge while engaging with the terms, techniques, and thought patters of successful innovators. from the Experience Point web-site.
I don’t want to say too much about the game itself (will spoil the fun for others) — but it is notable that we now all have a shared language from which to advance our understanding and practice of design thinking which is highly desirable. We have a platform for building design thinking + business concepts and skills.
My colleagues and I are looking for and finding ways to embed this idea of design thinking into our integrated core. We are experimenting with this model instead of a “separate course” which is often the way business schools are currently adding in design thinking.
Design thinking in action
This embedding notion is particularly useful in terms of developing and enhancing thinking and analytical processes. We have been stressing the differences between observations (without judgement) and insights from those observations as an effective way of ensuring evidence-based thought processes.
Small group work models the importance of developing skills in collaboration.
Will continue to blog as we develop more techniques for embedding and we get feedback from our students on how well that is working.
