Did you ever notice that although it is easy to explain design thinking to others, it is damn hard to teach it to them? I discovered this on the go, while I was teaching and coaching students, start-ups and management teams. Maybe hard to believe, but the hardest group are students. They listen, they nod their heads enthusiastically, but their lack of confidences is a genuine killer. Missing information and extreme ambiguity transforms into a drive to analyze everything to death. Design…

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In September 2012 Guido Stompff successfully defended his PhD thesis at the TU Delft, named "Facilitating Teamcognition. How designers mirror what teams do". The thesis is available at teamcognition.org

This PhD research is an in depth exploration of the practice of new product development (NPD).

To develop complex products, large…

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My latest blog: the unbearable lightness of designthinking. It considers 4 contesting paradigms / woldviews on innovation, based on a famous model of Daft and Weick (1984). These paradigms can be explained alongside two axes:

1. the belief to what extent 'world' can be analyzed, let alone predicted.

2. the belief to what extent an organization can change the course of events it is part of.

This results into a 2x2 matrix, depicting 4 quite distinct paradigms. Design…

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At Oce Technologies, a Canon Group Company, an interesting technological project was started. This aims to close the loop of printing paper in a fundamental way. Technologically this project is well underway, however we are aware it is not just technology. The central question is: will the many millions of users be willing to adapt to this new concept, for the sake of environment? This is not merely a question of choice: the way how Océ enables people to ‘close the loop’ is crucial for the… Continue