Design thinking and entrepreneurship education
The difference between much contemporary entrepreneurship educations, based on the rationale of causation and entrepreneurship education based on the idea of design thinking is sketched out in Table I. It indirectly indicates that tensions exist between much contemporary education and design thinking. The literature typically names this tension the “creativity-business tension” (Mills, 2012). Much time could be spent discussing and developing the content of the table, but for now the point is that the content provides a way to think about the shifts that design thinking can contribute in terms of entrepreneurship education.
Traditional entrepreneurship education provides students valuable learning about economics, accounting and budgets, and sometimes they also learn about what network can be used for to get knowledge and legitimacy, but it does not necessarily teach them about how to interact with the network and with someone coming from other disciplines. Here design methods help because they provide tools to communicate with people from different disciplines, for example through various types of objects, visualizations, models and prototype.
Dunne and Martin (2006) stress that in design thinking education, constraints in the learning process are the route to excitement and creativity. Provocations are one way to set up constraints (De Bono, 1992) and to make students explore alternative and unknown futures – what might be? The human brain is adept at using patterns, which is also what much university education utilizes. University students are often great pattern users and constraint eliminators, but they are less competent at working with constraints in a creative way and breaking these patterns. By applying design thinking, students can learn to look for ways to think outside the box of what is, and back into it again, and to turn things upside down in order to find opportunities and new ways of dealing with problems as opportunities. Design thinking makes students deal with problems as something wicked and complex. Problems are less as something that can be tamed upfront from rational and linier problem-solving.