Brilliant Ideas: Human Centred Design Toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs

Charmian Love

January 23, 2010

I was fortunate enough to speak at a fantastic Wavelength event yesterday, hosted by UK social enterprise guru Liam Black. After talking about what we do at Volans, and our view on how the corporate sector is increasingly interested in social innovation, a former classmate of mine, Tom Hulme, took the stage to talk about how his firm IDEO is also doing work in this space.

IDEO is a global design and innovation consulting company which works with many of the brands we all know and love. They apply a method called Design Thinking to the projects they work on with clients that include Nokia, Apple and many other multinational companies. In the words of their founder, Tim Brown, Design Thinking is ‘an approach that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods for problem solving to meet people’s needs in a technologically feasible and commercially viable way. In other words, design thinking is human-centered innovation.’ Full disclosure – Tim Brown is a member of our Volans Advisory Board.

In Tom’s remarks he mentioned that IDEO has created a FREE toolkit for social entrepreneurs which provides insight on how to apply Design Thinking to their models. The Human Centred Design Toolkit ‘helps organizations understand people’s needs in new ways, find innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind’. You can download it from the IDEO website (you need to register for it first).