The Need for Design Thinking in Business Schools

Abstract

The demands placed on today\u27s organizations and their managers suggest that we have to develop pedagogies combining analytic reasoning with a more exploratory skill set that design practitioners have embraced and business schools have traditionally neglected. Design thinking is an iterative, exploratory process involving visualizing, experimenting, creating, and prototyping of models, and gathering feedback. It is a particularly apt method for addressing innovation and messy, ill-structured situations. We discuss key characteristics of design thinking, link design-thinking characteristics to recent studies of cognition, and note how the repertoire of skills and methods that embody design thinking can address deficits in business school education

Teaching design thinking in business schools

“…This is consistent with the increasing use of project and problem-based pedagogical frameworks seen in the professions of engineering, medicine, business, and law (Dym, Agogino, Eris, Frey, & Leifer, 2005). The design thinking approach reflects the more general movement in education away from an over-dependence on passive teaching approaches, towards more active problem-based learning (Glen et al, 2014).…”

“…Design thinking differs in principle from analytical and linear problem solving approaches generally found in business schools (Glen, Suciu, & Baughn, 2014). The analytic approach emphasizes planning and optimizing objective, predefined criteria.…”

Foundation of Digital Badges and Micro-Credentials

“…Design thinking and design literacies have come to the forefront as important capabilities in the creation of usable systems, including educational ones ("Design Thinking for Educators", 2015 ; Glen, Suciu, & Baughn, 2014 ). Key to this is moving beyond the given-ness of existing structures and perceiving them as human created artefacts that can be disassembled and reassembled for different purposes.…”

Design and Design Thinking in Business and Management Higher Education

“…Interest in applying design thinking to management education is strongly influenced by Dunne and Martin (2006), Martin (2007a), and more recently by Glen, Sucio and Baughn (2014). This approach requires change from traditional work patterns to something closer to a "design shop" where the focus is on the flow of work life, style of work, mode of thinking, source of status and dominant attitude (Dunne & Martin, 2006).…”

“…This approach requires change from traditional work patterns to something closer to a "design shop" where the focus is on the flow of work life, style of work, mode of thinking, source of status and dominant attitude (Dunne & Martin, 2006). Glen et al (2014) argued that design methods align with adaptive reasoning in real-world settings.…”