Abstract:

This paper presents three cases of design sprint courses conducted in higher education and implemented in diverse ways. First, the framework of design thinking is presented. Secondly, three cases of university courses implementing design thinking as a work method are discussed and compared. The last part discusses learnings of the cases and gives recommendations.

Design thinking is a human-centric approach that solves business problems by bringing together the needs of people, viable business solutions and technology in innovative ways. Design thinking in its various applications has become popular in the 21st century business environments. It originates in the late 90’s in the Stanford d. School’s design process of five steps. In the framework of design thinking there are various other approaches such as Design Council’s Double Diamond and Google Ventures’ Design Sprint. The approaches have in common customer-centricity, objectives to tackle business problems, combining disciplines and specialists from different fields, using innovative tools, and a fast pace of work where ideas are tested with prototypes. The objective of all approaches is to create innovative solutions that are desirable, technologically feasible and viable for businesses to realize.

The first course case implemented Design Sprint by Google Ventures on institutional level in Bachelor level education. The Design Sprint approach implemented gave student teams independence to adjust and lead the work themselves. The teacher team coaching the sprint have prior experience in facilitating design sprint. The second course case, Ekotek Nord, had also the Google Venture’s Design Sprint approach. The participants were an international group of university students from different countries. The sprint work comprised of student centered and teacher lead activities. The teacher that facilitated this course came from different universities and had earlier worked together with similar courses. The third case was a 10 days 100 challenges course given by a consortium of three universities in Finland. This sprint week implemented Stanford d. School model and Google Venture approaches. The student participants formed an interdisciplinary and international group of Master and Bachelor level students. The course in this third case comprised of a MOOC (massive open online course), a 7-day sprint and a learning diary. This model includes in-depth customer research, and creation of concepts and business models.

All the three cases were successful, and the participants gained competences in service design. The learning processes and outcomes were slightly different, which might be because of the different approaches to design thinking, different pre-study assignments and backgrounds of the student teams. However, all the students felt that they had learnt the method. There were differences in the teamwork experiences and needs of guidance. The paper presents the strengths and weaknesses of each case in more detail and gives recommendations for further work.

Keywords:

Design thinking, design sprint, service design, customer orientation, problem solving, innovation, 21st century skills.