With design thinking, students move beyond the traditional way of solving problems - going from thinking of a problem they want to solve, and coming up with a solution that they think will address that problem at hand - to truly embodying Customer Driven Innovation. Through this process, students are challenged to deeply learn about their target audience first through customer empathy - understanding their pain points with the status quo, and then getting specific about the customer’s true needs. Students leverage brainstorming practices, and inclusive narrowing to determine the solution that they feel will most effectively address the customer’s needs, and then design a rapid experiment, that costs little to no money, and can be performed in under 48 hours, to see if their innovation has the intended effect.
