In a mix of art and business, a new workshop sponsored by the full-time MBA program at American University’s Kogod School of Business and the new Kogod Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiative (SEII) looks at how good aesthetic design can lead to good business. That’s the hypothesis behind Design Thinking (DT), a popular business strategy that purports that managers and entrepreneurs can better improve their own problem-solving and creative abilities by understanding how designers approach problems.
Graduate business students, entrepreneurs, and other members of the American University community came together on March 8 for a Design Thinking for Entrepreneurship workshop to explore these ideals. The workshop was facilitated by Peter Khanahmadi, MBA ’10, an innovation consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, and Daniel Graff, an instructor at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, with expertise in design thinking.
“When done properly, good DT can add value to any project,” Graff said. “But if you focus too much on form and not enough on function, you’re not going to serve the client at all.”
Those in attendance performed in group exercises and worked in teams to produce design concepts for an Incubator, part of the new Kogod SEII, which is set to open later this spring.
