Infrastructure Innovation met Port of Rotterdam

Spring Company heeft samen met professor Michael Shanks een Design Thinking Bootcamp gegeven bij Port of Rotterdam. Daarbij is Design Thinking toegepast op Infrastructure Innovation.

Design Thinking is een human-centered en agile methode voor de ontwikkeling van nieuwe oplossingen en innovaties. De behoeften van de gebruiker staan hierin centraal en het proces verloopt in flexibele, terugkerende stappen. De Design Thinking methode biedt handvatten om tot superieure oplossingen te komen, de risico’s en kosten van innovatie te beheersen en om draagvlak voor nieuwe oplossingen te creëren. Lees meer in het artikel ‘Wat is Design Thinking? Het proces en de kracht van deze populaire innovatiemethode’

Over prof. Michael Shanks – Stanford University

Stanford University, regularly acknowledged as one of the top three universities in the world, is the heart of Silicon Valley’s innovation culture. The design division of the university’s Engineering School has been a key component in the development and continuing growth and success of Silicon Valley. For three decades and more in collaboration with start-ups as well as Fortune 500 companies this experience has been distilled into a set of principles and practices, often called “design thinking”, that lie behind the innovation and success not just of the IT industry but of many projects in community building and services, local and national politics.

Michael Shanks is senior faculty affiliated with the design group at Stanford University – the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, Stanford’s famous d.school, the Center for Design Research, as well as Stanford’s Center for Professional Development, the university’s agency devoted to sharing innovation culture and design thinking with the business community. An accomplished award winning communicator, he teaches the biggest design class voted by Stanford students one of the top ten “must do classes” in the university. A humanist, historian and archaeologist, Michael takes a broad brush view of human centered innovation in finding practical solutions to challenges facing businesses and organizations. As a member of Stanford Strategy Studio, Stanford Foresight and Innovation, and Innovation Leadership Board, he has worked with many companies and agencies across the world.

Michael has been a member of Rotterdam’s International Advisory Board since 2008 and knows well the needs of its businesses and communities.

Design Thinking

Design thinking has emerged as the way to make a difference. Not just in products and services, but in addressing questions of how to solve the world’s problems and how to run your organization better as well – to figure out how to deal with complexity and ambiguity and to create new value, wellbeing for as many as possible. Business schools across the US run programs in design thinking. Major Fortune 500 companies like Intel and Proctor and Gamble and now Google have embraced design thinking. More than a third of startups in Silicon Valley adopt a design-based approach.

Here is how it is expressed by the authors of “Solving Problems with Design Thinking” (Darden School of Business, University of Virginia; Columbia Business School Publishing):

“What do you get when managers join forces with designers? You get a group of business strategists who come up with a metaphor that makes a new strategy feel real and meaningful for the people who must implement it. And a city that finds opportunities for revitalization by drawing on its citizens’ creative energy. And a meal delivery service for the elderly that transforms itself by considering the needs not just of clients but of the employees preparing the food. In short, you get a different kind of conversation among those who matter, a process that can yield unexpected solutions to thorny problems.”