Hi, I'm Jeanne Liedtka and welcome to Design Thinking for the Greater Good, Innovation in the Social Sector. Here at the Darden School of Business where I teach, our path into the world of design thinking came originally through the for-profit world. For almost a decade now, we've been studying design thinking as a methodology for improving business innovation and growth and examining its successful use in global corporations like IBM, Toyota and 3M. Then we noticed that the most inspiring stories of all were coming from the social sector, from government, healthcare, education, charitable foundations, and the like. We realized that the fundamental reason design thinking works so well in business, its ability to create better value for customers, was even more urgently needed in the social sector. There, the problems were bigger and messier and solving them mattered even more. We became fascinated by the ability of design to make the world a better, not just a more profitable place. As researchers and teachers, we wanted to know more details. Exactly what did these efforts look like in practice? Where and why were they working, or not? What could we learn from them, and how could we teach them to others? This course is the culmination of all of that search. Let me tell you a little bit more about myself as we get started. I'm a strategy professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. And I like to joke that I fell in love with design thinking because I'm the least creative person I know. Maybe that's why my passion is demystifying design for people like me. My own education is in business. I started off as an accountant then got an MBA and a doctorate. Here at Darden I've been the director of the Batten Institute, a research center devoted to entrepreneurship and innovation, that sponsored a lot of the research that we'll be talking about in this class. I've also been an associate dean of our MBA program and the Chief Learning Officer of a Fortune 50 corporation. But what really matters in all of this is that I've been studying the way designers think and its relevance to organizations for over ten years now. I've written several books on the topic, some of which you may find useful as reference material. Again, my goal has always been deciphering design-thinking for people like myself who have been told repeatedly that we are definitely not the creative ones. My first design book, Designing for Growth, which I coauthored with Tim Ogilvie, looks in detail at the process and the specific tools that we'll be looking at in action in this class. It's really a how-to guide for those looking for specific instructions about how to use design. There's a project field book to go with it. Another book, Solving Problems with Design Thinking, co-authored with Andrew King and Kevin Bennett, is a story book. It looks at the stories of ten organizations, mostly in business, who are using design thinking to solve a wide variety of different kinds of problems. As we turn to the social sector and the work we'll talk about in this course, the intention of myself and my two fellow researchers, Randy Salzman and Daisy Azer, was to identify organizations outside the traditional for-profit business sector. In areas such as healthcare, education, the arts, the environment, government policy, transportation, social services. All using design thinking approaches and methods to improve the quality of what they delivered to utilize their resources more efficiently, and to create better experiences for the people they served. The three of us recently summarized that work in our new book, Designing for the Greater Good. To follow on to this effort, we decided that it was important to convene a conversation in which we could share the inspiring stories we heard and the tools they used. So that other aspiring social innovators could bring the design thinking approach to their organization. And that's why we created this course. During the remainder of our time together, we'll be sharing what we learned, along with the stories that inspired us, and the tools and methods we saw being used to create more powerful futures. Whether those were for patients, or school children, or citizens or farmers. In this first module, we'll tee up an overview of design thinking. What it is, why it's different, and especially why we need it in these uncertain times, especially in complex organizations. We'll examine the design thinking methodology that we've developed here at Darden that looks at four simple questions. And we'll illustrate that approach with a visit to the Kingwood Trust in the UK. We'll conclude this module by giving you a chance to hear from some other experts, Angela Meyer on the visualization tool and Dan Pink. So are you ready to get started?
