Thursday, February 18, 2010

Design Thinking for Social Innovation - Post # 3

This is the last post on an article entitled Design Thinking for Social Innovation by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, which appears in the current (Winter 2010) issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

My primary take away from the article is this: Always prototype an initiative to solicit feedback from the constituents you seek to serve. Rely on local expertise to uncover local solutions that work, then help scale up the solutions. This bottom up design model insures that you are using your constituents’ very best ideas to help design a lasting solution to meet their actual (not perceived) needs.

As a foundation leader, I see opportunities for applying design thinking to strategic plan initiatives. The design thinking described in this article has been codified by IDEO, a global innovation and design firm, into the “Human Centered Design Toolkit.” It is available as a free download from www.hcdtoolkit.com.

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