Abstract
Business schools around the world are increasingly integrating design thinking into their curricula, which invites definition of a new professional identity for individuals effectively working at the intersection of the two fields. Research is needed, however, to understand what such a profession might entail and in what ways students might best be prepared to enter it. Defining the capabilities that a design thinking business professional will embody requires an understanding of the ways design thinking complements or contradicts more traditional critical thinking approaches applied to business decisions. This chapter adopts a framework grounded in learning theory to describe the four basic capabilities needed to frame and solve problems in practice: observing and noticing; framing and reframing; imagining and designing; and making and experimenting. Using that framework, it unpacks the contributions that design and critical thinking make to the development of each of the capabilities in a business setting and highlights challenges associated with helping business students learn design thinking and how they might use it to complement other approaches to framing and solving business problems.
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Notes
- 1.
Four additional learning styles have been identified that characterize people who operate at the ends of the two spectrums (Kolb and Kolb 2005a).
- 2.
It is worth noting that the underlying data associated with individuals is more illustrative of their preferences that the simple categorization provided here, as scores may vary within a given learning style. Overall averages of the data, however, show significantly lower scores on concrete experience and reflective observation on average.
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Dzombak, R., Beckman, S. (2020). The Road to Becoming a Design Thinking Business Professional: Expected Bumps Along the Way. In: Melles, G. (eds) Design Thinking in Higher Education. Design Science and Innovation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5780-4_2
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