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private sectors innovate and grow. We help clients envision what their new or existing operations might look like in the future—and build road maps for getting there. Beyond the product development work Tom described in The Art of Innovation, we now have the opportunity to create new companies and brands, working with clients all over the world to help them launch new products, services, spaces, and interactive experiences. While we continue to work on products from toys to ATM machines, these days we are just as likely to create a digital toolkit to help consumers sign up for health care insurance or design a better education system for the country of Peru. In the last several years, we have worked directly with clients to help them embed innovation into the fabric of their enterprises.

      Both at IDEO and in our client organizations, we’ve found that design thinking helps to foster creative cultures and build the internal systems required to sustain innovation and launch new ventures.

       BORN TO FLIP—THE BIRTH OF THE D.SCHOOL

      In the early 2000s, David started experimenting with team teaching at Stanford with professors from other parts of the university (like Terry Winograd from Computer Science, Bob Sutton from Management Science and Engineering, and Jim Patell from the business school). Prior to that, David had taught only students in the design division at the School of Engineering who already identified themselves as creative. In these new interdisciplinary courses, however, he worked with MBAs and computer science students who often didn’t think of themselves that way.

      It was in these classrooms that David and his colleagues could see what unlocking creativity really looked like.

      Some of the students went beyond just using the tools and embraced the philosophy of design thinking, and in doing so, they developed a new mental outlook, a new self-image, and a new sense of empowerment. Students began visiting him during office hours—sometimes months after the class was over—to tell him that they had started to see themselves as creative individuals for the first time. That they could apply creativity to any challenge. Their eyes would light up with excitement, with a sense of opportunity, of possibility. Sometimes they cried.

      David came up with a name for the transformation he was observing: “flipping”—changing from one state of mind to another. The playfulness of the term “flipping” reminded him of the joyful poetry of a somersault on a trampoline or a diving board.

      These students he talked with were engaged and excited in a way that made it clear something in them had changed—permanently. It was the sort of profound impact educators live for.

      Along with former student George Kembel (now executive director of the d.school), David began to talk with friends and colleagues about starting a new program. He envisioned a place in the university where students from different backgrounds could come to nurture their creative talents and apply their newfound skills to tough challenges. David pointed out that Stanford—like all world-class universities—had Nobel-laureate-quality researchers drilling deeper into their own fields of knowledge. But he suggested that there are tremendous challenges in the twenty-first century that aren’t going to be solved that way. Maybe some solutions will be found by putting that scientist into a room with a businessperson, and a lawyer, and an engineer, and others. Rather than keeping all their eggs in the “going deep” basket, David proposed that Stanford make at least a small side bet on “going broad.” And one day the new institute might have the respect and the cachet of the graduate school of business—commonly known as the “B-school.” That’s how the new venture got its nickname, which has stuck ever since: the “d.school.”

      When he told Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of enterprise software giant SAP, about the idea, Hasso generously reached for his checkbook. The d.school—officially known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design—opened its doors in 2005.

       NURTURING CREATIVE THINKERS

      While IDEO’s work historically focused on innovations, from the beginning the Stanford d.school has focused on innovators. Students from every graduate school at Stanford come to take classes at the d.school. It doesn’t issue degrees and doesn’t have any required courses—everyone is there because they want to be. Currently more than seven hundred students attend courses at the d.school each year. Project-based classes are team taught by faculty members from all over the university and by industry practitioners. In this diverse environment, it’s normal to hear many points of view—often conflicting ones. Students learn by doing and tackle real-world challenges, usually in multidisciplinary teams. Beyond just graduate students, executives from all over the world attend workshops, and the K-12 Lab works with children and educators (more than five hundred last year) to help spread confidence in their creative abilities.

      Classes often start with simple design briefs—succinct articulations of a challenge—like “redesign the experience of getting your morning coffee.” When confronted with a question or a problem such as the morning coffee challenge, people with strong analytical skills tend to snap instantly into problem-solving mode. They leap for the finish line and then start defending their answers.

      The d.school brings together ideas and people from all over the university.

      (photo/illustration credit 1.3)

      For example, think about how quickly a skilled doctor—when presented with a set of symptoms—makes a diagnosis and prescribes a solution. Often it’s a matter of seconds. During one morning coffee challenge a few years back, a med-school student in the class immediately raised a hand and said, “I know what we need: a new kind of coffee creamer.” For such skilled analytical thinkers, an “unresolved” issue hanging in the air is uncomfortable. They are anxious to provide an answer and move on. In routine problem-solving situations, where there is a single right answer, that method is very efficient, and sometimes quite appropriate. Creative thinkers, however, confronted with the same open-ended question, are careful not to rush to judgment. They recognize that there are many possible solutions and are willing to “go wide” first, identifying a number of possible approaches before converging on the ideas most worth implementing.

      So David and the d.school professors ask the students to set aside their initial answers—the cliché ones already in their heads. They encourage students to dig deeper, to understand the situation better, observing people’s behaviors around coffee drinking in order to identify latent needs and opportunities. After the group has been guided through the design process in a collaborative environment, dozens of ideas emerge: everything from a coffeepot that knows exactly how hot you like your drink—and delivers it that way every time—to an automatic stirrer you drop into your cup. Then professors ask class members if any of the new solutions they arrived at were better than their initial ones. Usually, the answer is yes.

      One prerequisite for achieving creative confidence is the belief that your innovation skills and capabilities are not set in stone.

       A GROWTH STATE OF MIND

      One prerequisite for achieving creative confidence is the belief that your innovation skills and capabilities are not set in stone. If you currently feel that you are not a creative person—if you think, “I’m not good at that kind of thing”—you have to let go of that belief before you can move on. You have to believe that learning and growth are possible. In other words, you need to start with what Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset.”

      Individuals with a growth mindset, Dweck says, “believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.” She makes a compelling case, backed up by extensive research, that regardless of our initial talent, aptitude, or even IQ, we can expand our capabilities through effort and experience.

      To fully appreciate the growth mindset, it helps to contrast it with its all-too-familiar

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