APJ: Design Thinking Lecture at Donghua University, Shanghai, China, 17th Nov. 2015

[BennySun]

A special lecture on Design Thinking was delivered to 30 professors from School of Business and Management, Donghua University on November 17th, by the invitation from Professor Kejing Zhang, Vice Dean of Business School, DHU. This was also a follow up event to further expanding DT influence within Business School of DHU ever since the DT workshop for MBA students completed on Oct 20th.

Nicolas Leclercq from Agile & Design Thinking team designed the content and conducted the whole 2-hour lecture. Vincent Bai and Benny Sun also joined as observer and assistant. To maximize the learning experience for the professors, the content was well tailored to ensure all the attendees can actually experience the DT process with a real challenge in a short period. The lecture started with the challenge "Rethink the work-life balance for professors at DHU". Every attendee got a nice printed workbook to pair up and follow the DT process to workout a solution for the challenge within 1 hour. It definitely require high standard coaching skills and experience to control the time, in the meantime, make sure everyone is actively working on the topic. At the end of the exercise, several teams stood up to share solutions with the whole group and gained feedback of it.

The last 30 minutes was the traditional lecture-style where Nicolas talked about Design Thinking approach and explained the key elements one by one. He also shared about the real impact of using DT in the software development at SAP. It's much better for professors to understand and get the inspiration of DT in such a short time by "experience the DT" in the first place. All the attendees actively interacted with the others, and obviously that most of the professors really inspired by  DT approach through this lecture.

Before closing, all the attendees discussed the potential areas where DHU could apply DT in the near future. Some professors showed their immediate interests to apply DT into their class right after the lecture. The whole session was a very successful and we really look forward to a boarder and greater collaboration with DHU in the coming future.