CCPS Deans’ Paper Recognized during International Design Factory Week

Luca Iandoli, Ph.D., Interim Dean and Professor, The Lesley H. and William L. Collins College of Professional Studies, and Kevin T. James ’11C, ’13MBA, Assistant Dean and Director of Fiscal Affairs, were recently awarded “The Study That Exemplified Creativity for DFGN.R” award from The Science Advisory Board for their paper, “Design-driven Entrepreneurship: A Cooking Exercise to Integrate Effectuation and Design Thinking.” 

At the Design Factory Global Network’s International Design Factory Week, a five-day event where design factories around the globe meet to plan collaboration, share best practices, and offer inspiration, the board recognized their experimentation with new ways to combine education, research, and impact, and recognized their ability to find new methods to share the “passion for doing.”

Their paper represented how successful thinking occurs, via the combination of tools and constraints with pleasing decision criteria based on entrepreneurs’ perceptions, emotions, preferences, and technical abilities. They proposed an educational framework and presented experiential learning exercises to provide students with an effective analogy to practice implementation via a design-driven experience. This framework will the students reflect on the importance of aesthetic criteria, emotional validation, and empathy in entrepreneurial endeavors. Their proposed exercise was built on using cooking as a metaphor for design-driven innovation.

The paper has been accepted for publication in the CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research.