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Traditional paradigms of leadership have celebrated decisive top-down control and analytical decision making. But times are changing. The world is becoming more connected, complex, fluid, and interdependent.

Leading people in this age requires empathy, collaboration, curiosity, and creativity. It’s more about designing elegant solutions than mandating feasible ones. It’s more about becoming optimistic beacons of change than authoritative custodians of the status quo. The leaders of tomorrow are not commanders, they are innovators; and in that, they have a natural ally in designers – the poster children of innovation.

This chapter focuses on how leadership can leverage tools and frameworks usually associated with design to innovate, solve complex problems, motivate teams, inspire people, and nurture the next generation of leaders. It discusses design methodologies – user-focused design, lean, design thinking – as potential approaches to optimizing organizational leadership. We elaborate these ideas through real-world examples.

The chapter also offers actionable tips and techniques that designers use to respond empathetically and elegantly to complex human needs, which are rooted deeply in behaviors and attitudes, governed by complex interactions, and therefore, hard to grapple through a purely analytical approach.

It debunks the myth that leaders need to be creative similar to designers to apply Design Thinking. Applying design approaches and practices to organizational leadership is not just about its leaders becoming more creative. It is definitely not about the person at the top coming up with the grand answer. It is a collaborative effort that brings people from all levels together in pursuit of a common goal.

This chapter aims to advance economic development theory through the concept of jurisdictional advantage; demonstrating how places might strategically position themselves to gain economic advantage; then considering how this place-specific advantage might be constructed. We choose the term “jurisdiction” to define the set of actors that have a common interest in a spatially bound community. Jurisdictions are entities with a legitimate political ability to influence social and economic outcomes within their boundaries. Borrowing from the literature on corporate strategy, the uniqueness of local capabilities becomes a source of advantage for jurisdictions. We consider how to measure and construct jurisdictional advantage.

This chapter focuses on practical considerations for organizations when endeavoring to invest in design, specifically how designers and their organizations should view their profession for the benefit of corporate innovation. Given the lack of consensus regarding what strategic design entails, the author interviewed strategic designers from across the United States to solicit their opinions on design thinking, strategic design, and design strategy, the relationship between those concepts, and how those concepts are, could be, and should be reflected in practice.

The overarching purpose of this chapter is to explore the relatively nascent profession of strategic design, from which the author distinguishes design strategy, as well as to provide guidance regarding how design and designers should be viewed and supported by the leadership of their organizations in order to fully empower them to support innovation. In addition, this chapter serves to better define the concepts of design thinking, strategic design, and design strategy. While design as a discipline is broad, for the sake of consistency, the author discusses design in the context of technological development and, in turn, in terms of human-computer interaction.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) has gained acceptance as a contemporary and progressive teaching pedagogy that provides a holistic and inclusive experience to learners in higher education (HE) institutions. However, its lack of appeal to non-STEM subjects and the need for further development, particularly concerning improved approaches, have been recognized. It seems that CBL runs the risk of becoming a portmanteau pedagogy that blends aspects of problem-based learning, project-based learning, and situated learning, as opposed to its development as an effective pedagogy tool. This points to a lack of a formal implementation framework, code of practice, and standard procedures for its delivery. We argue that blending a design thinking (DT) pedagogy with CBL can potentially provide the stability that CBL currently lacks. At the same time, it also presents a more inclusive proposition to potential non-STEM audiences. Thus, in this chapter, we seek to interrogate the intersectionality between CBL and DT literature in the context of HE teaching and learning with a view of establishing CBL as a pedagogy in its own right. We attempt to achieve this by systematically analyzing the separate literature to reveal the synergies and common touchpoints.

Today’s business leaders face a global environment that is marked by increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions. Design thinking offers a proven way to navigate in a VUCA environment. I used this approach while serving as a military officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. This chapter focuses on what I learned from applying design thinking to our operations as well as on insights from businesses that have also successfully integrated design thinking. I use the framework “inspire, ideate, and implement” to describe how I utilized design thinking. I finish the chapter with key factors for successfully employing a design methodology to VUCA problems.

Design thinking empowers organizations to tackle successfully VUCA challenges. Inspiration allows designers to frame relevant problems that clients care about. With the pressing challenge in hand, designers immerse themselves in the context of a problem to empathize with a customer’s concerns. They synthesize input from a variety of diverse sources, and meet experts who can give meaning to their collected data. With this comprehensive picture in hand, design teams brainstorm new possibilities as they move into ideation. Taking their ideas out for a test run, they iterate the most promising ways to move into action. They conduct pilot projects, adapt to what works best, and share their learning from the process. Leaders with a design mindset, aligned with a collaborative organizational culture and congruent support systems, can build an innovative enterprise that is primed to thrive in a VUCA world.