Everybody is a Designer

Last Wednesday, we welcomed Matthew Holloway, the VP of the Design Service Team (DST) at SAP AG in our seminar. Matthew's cellphone kept going off because it was the launch day of SAP's SAP BusinessByDesign. Thanks for coming anyway, Matthew!

The DST was created by Hasso Plattner, one of the co-founders of SAP, in 2005, after he read about IDEO in a Business Week article about Design Thinking. It is unusual in a number of ways, working across all business units and reporting directly to the office of the CEO. The purpose is the get everybody at SAP to think about how they are designing and to design with the customers in mind

Important for our seminar, as students are just beginning to work on their projects, is the discovery-driven way in which designers work, as opposed to the hypothesis-driven way of many business people. If you want to come up with new and different solutions to old problems, and that is what much of Social Entrepreneurship and ICTD is all about, then you need to set aside your assumptions, suspend your judgements and search for many different perspectives to the problem. Keep your mind and your options open and don't fixate on one idea to soon. Never assume that you know why things are the way they are. Never stop asking questions.

Innovation = Invention x Execution.

Thanks, Matthew.