Everyone designs. Business people have focused on designing organizations to reliably generate profits. Today’s designers have focused on designing products and services to be truly compelling to customers. What is most compelling to customers though, is often not rational or logical. So designers have evolved effective and efficient trial-and-error approaches that recognize and accommodate rational and non-rational factors. When these heuristics have been applied to strategy and business modeling, it has produced businesses such as the Apple’s iTunes and iPod ecosystem. Design Thinking balances left brain and right brain decision-making, and when applied to strategy work often creates bigger win-wins for companies and their customers, than achievable through conventional thinking.

In this short experiential workshop, based on techniques used at HP, we will provide a brief introduction to the key concepts, break up into small teams and step through a facilitated Design Thinking exercise. At the end of the session, we will regroup to learn from each team’s experience with the process.

The Design Thinking approach is collaborative, interdisciplinary and highly relevant to anyone involved in the development of new products and services: product managers, engineers, designers, and marketers. The objective of this workshop is to provide you with the foundations of Design Thinking and launch your on-going learning on the topic.

Due to the interactive nature of the exercise, we’ll have to limit the number of registrants so register early to make sure you get to participate that evening.

A special thanks to the Oregon Technology Business Center (OTBC) for hosting this event.