Design Thinking

Management and professional business education is central to developing human talent that can help organizations be competitive in today’s complex business environment. So the question for management educators is how do we know that graduates have the talent that business needs? Learning outcome assessment has been the process used by colleges of business to answer this question. Good progress has been made in integrating assessment into the culture of business colleges, yet transformative challenges remain. This article presents a preliminary overview of how the spaces of design thinking may be used to enrich the story management programs and colleges of business tell about student learning. The article is not prescriptive nor does it tell the story of how private and not-for-profit organizations use design thinking. Instead, the article considers how focusing on questions, ideas, and integration of stakeholder requirements—a central component of design thinking—can foster creativity and innovation that strengthens how assessment processes are developed so the resulting decisions support substantive change. To assist the reader, the appendix contains an overview of assessment and design thinking terminology.