Using Design Thinking to Teach Entrepreneurship in the Classroom

Entrepreneurship education equips students with skills and knowledge to help them thrive in today’s dynamic world — like creativity, resilience, critical thinking, flexibility, and ethical and social responsibility.

By developing an entrepreneurial mindset, many students will feel empowered to navigate unique challenges, seize new opportunities, and make meaningful contributions to society.

Entrepreneurship education is gaining more recognition and being incorporated into curriculum at some high schools — either through standalone courses or as part of business education programs.

In my experience teaching entrepreneurship courses to high school students, I have found that Design Thinking can be an impactful framework to foster entrepreneurial skills and a self-starter mindset among my students.

In this blog post, we are discussing how to use design thinking to teach entrepreneurship in the classroom.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to solving problems. By utilizing the Design Thinking process, individuals are able to identify and empathize with the needs and challenges of others, and then design innovative solutions to solve these problems.

The Design Thinking process consists of five key steps:

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

In the next section, we’ll define each of these steps and explain its connection to entrepreneurship education.

You may also like these blog posts on Design Thinking in the Classroom.

Applying Design Thinking to Entrepreneurship Education

Integrating Design Thinking into entrepreneurship education can help students through every stage of product development — from empathy interviews to user testing. In this section, we’ll take a look at each stage of the Design Thinking process and how it relates to business and entrepreneurship.

1. Empathy: The first stage of the Design Thinking process, Empathize, is all about understanding your target audience (i.e. customer) and their needs. In the context of entrepreneurship education, this stage means helping students develop an understanding of and empathy toward the problems, pain points, needs, and dreams of their ideal customers. By identifying these needs, students will be able to develop more meaningful solutions — products or services.
2. Define: Once students have gained key insights from empathizing with their ideal customer, they will need to clearly define the problem they are hoping to solve through the form of a problem statement. By reframing these needs, challenges, or pain points into a problem statement, students will have a clearer understanding of how to create an actionable solution. In other words, by explicitly defining the problem, students will have more clarity to ideate more human-centered products or services.
3. Ideate: The Ideate stage is all about brainstorming — generating a wide range of creative ideas. Rather than limiting students to think narrowly, ideation encourages students to think outside of the box, beyond conventional solutions and toward innovative solutions and approaches. This stage tends to be the most commonly associated with Design Thinking, recognized for its sticky note-style brainstorming techniques and idea mapping. These creative exercises help students to learn divergent thinking and generate a mass of potential products or services that solve the customer’s problem.
4. Prototype: Prototyping is a process used to transform ideas into reality. In entrepreneurship, prototyping typically consists of developing physical products, digital mock-ups, or even service experiences. A prototype is sometimes referred to as a “first build” of an idea.
5. Test: Testing is the last official stage of Design Thinking (though the process is certainly iterative and never technically done!). During the Testing stage, students will evaluate the viability, desirability, and feasibility of their prototypes. They will also re-engage with their ideal customers by gathering feedback and making edits (or iterating) based on the insights gained. During this stage, students resilience, flexibility, and growth will be put to the test — all traits which are critical to becoming a successful entrepreneur!

Benefits of Using Design Thinking to Entrepreneurship Education

Organizations around the world — including IDEO and the Stanford d.school — use Design Thinking to create innovative solutions. In the classroom, students can use this approach to engage in authentic learning experiences.

Design Thinking helps students learn how to (1) communicate and define a problem, (2) conduct interviews and develop empathy, (3) solve real-world problems and practice creativity, and (4) understand others, the needs of others, and their own place in the world.

Some of the main benefits of using Design Thinking to teach entrepreneurship include:

Creativity and Innovation

Design Thinking fosters a culture of creativity and innovation. By utilizing the Design Thinking process to develop their business ideas, students will be empowered to explore unconventional and outside-of-the-box ideas, as well as challenge the status quo. Students will learn to use creativity to build innovative solutions and solve meaningful problems.

User-Centered Approach

Design Thinking, at its very core, is rooted in understanding the needs, challenges, and desires of others. It’s all about empathy. By focusing carefully on a customer’s needs, students will create more meaningful products and services that truly address challenges, thus leading to an increase in customer satisfaction!

Iterative Mindset

Iteration is another key principle of Design Thinking. Students will have to try and try again, meaning that they will have to practice resilience, flexibility, and a growth mindset. They will learn to view mistakes as opportunities.

Using Design Thinking to Teach Entrepreneurship in the Classroom

With its human-centered, iterative approach, Design Thinking provides student entrepreneurs with a clear framework to identify and solve problems, develop innovative products and services, and build skills beyond a traditional business education. In my experience teaching, Design Thinking has been an effective framework to teach my students entrepreneurial skills — encouraging students to focus on the impact of their ideas.

Thank You!

Thank you for reading this blog post on using Design Thinking to teach entrepreneurship in the classroom. What other ways have you tried out Design Thinking in your classroom? Let me know in the comments below!