Entrepreneurship students collaborate with design thinking

Design thinking is an important part of entrepreneurship, focusing on learning from other people to identify patterns and define design principles to make tangible progress or changes.

This spring, Kirk Kern, director of the Hamilton Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, partnered with Jenn Stucker, associate professor and chair of the graphic design division, to create a class that brought together 24 students from School of Art, College of Business, College of Education and Human Development and College of Technology, Architecture and Applied Engineering.

The class was made possible through the Rick Valicenti Collaborative Teaching Initiative. Valicenti, a 1973 School of Art alumnus and founder and president of his own design firm in Chicago, envisioned and generously supported the collaborative teaching initiative to encourage new ways to promote creativity.

The goal was to teach students how to work together for a shared goal when others on the team brought different skill sets and perspectives. “In a work environment, you will work with people from many different departments and backgrounds,” Kern explained. “An engineer may think differently than a marketer, for example, but they both need to collaborate effectively on projects.”

These different perspectives inspired some discussions that Kern described as “intriguing,” but the result, he said, was positive. “They learned to assess and utilize each other’s talents to leverage the best possible outcomes. This gave all the students insight into how teams operate in today’s work environment.”