Stanford d.school Aims to Produce Next Generation of Innovators
By Karla Robinson
September 12, 2012
September 12, 2012
- David Kelley, founder and chairman of design and innovation firm IDEO, launched “d.school” at Stanford in 2005 as a place to build creative confidence… and geniuses like Steve Jobs. Kelley recently joined Stanford professor Bob Sutton onstage at a MIX Mashup to discuss their philosophy.
- Officially named the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, d.school is “a multi-disciplinary mashup of design thinking principles, real-world projects, and collaboration,” Fortune explains. The 17 courses offered each semester cover a variety of themes, but are all aimed at breaking down the walls inhibiting innovation.
- The first step in the program is “desensitize yourself to failure,” the article reports. In order to try out ground-breaking ideas, people have to be willing to fail, step outside their area of expertise and celebrate the small successes along the way.
- Sutton describes the next big cornerstone in d.school philosophy as “do to think.” Instead of starting off planning or figuring how to make an idea profitable, jump into it and make a prototype. Next, play up your inner five-year-old and ask: Why? How? What if?
- “Genuine questions demonstrate a sense of humility, curiosity, even vulnerability,” explains the article. “And they offer up a powerful advantage in a world of expanding complexity and change — a world in which no single individual can possibly have all of the answers, but an open, curious one can attract more perspectives, surface more possibilities, and enlist more help than if they’re closed off by certainty.”
- Teaching these three elements at d.school, Kelley hopes to not only build creative confidence but also “self-efficacy,” or as psychologist Albert Bandura explains, “the sense that you can change the world and that you can do what you set out to do.”
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