Instructor Resource
Neck, Entrepreneurship, 1e
SAGE Publishing, 2018
Answers to Questions in the Text
Chapter 6: Using Design Thinking
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ACTION
Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin, Founders, Hövding
1. What do you think was the main catalyst for Haupt and Alstin to design a new bicycle
helmet?
2. How would you describe the creative process of designing something that does not
exist?
3. What are some ways for an entrepreneur to go beyond convention to design a product
to appeal to a particular market?
Sample Answer: Conventional needs are those that everyone is already aware of (e.g., biking
RESEARCH AT WORK
Helping You Find Your Inner Adult
1. What do you see as the value of providing life insurance services to the under-40 age
group?
2. Do you agree that people under 40 need a “hip, informal environment” to encourage
them to think seriously about the future? Why or why not?
3. What other strategies do you think might appeal to this demographic when it comes
to life insurance and financial planning?
ENTREPRENEURSHIP MEETS ETHICS
Empathy as an Ethical Challenge
1. How can you design collaboratively and inclusively when resources are highly unequal?
2. Design thinking requires incorporation of user feedback and possibly scrapping your
original designs. Have you ever had to throw away work you have spent weeks or
months on and start over? Would you perceive this as progress or failure?
Instructor Resource
Neck, Entrepreneurship, 1e
SAGE Publishing, 2018
Sample Answer: Everyone has experienced this in one form or another (whether as a student,
3. Provide an example of a time when empathy, or an emotional desire to help solve a
problem, prompted you to think creatively. What did you do? What were the results?
MINDSHIFT
Observation to Insights
1. Do you agree that observing and seeing are two different skills? In what ways, if any, are
they different?
Sample Answer: There is a big difference between seeing and observing. Any thoughtful person
2. In the A-E-I-O-U framework, which aspect of observation did you find the most useful?
The most challenging? Explain your answers.
3. What nonobvious insight can you identify for the space you observed in this exercise?
To assess whether your insight is innovative, how would you go about seeing whether
others have already had the same insight?
Summary Questions
1. Define design thinking.
Similar to the practice of entrepreneurship in many ways, design thinking is ultimately a
2. Demonstrate design thinking as a human-centered process focusing on the customer and
their needs.
3. Describe the role of empathy in the design thinking process.
To create meaningful ideas and innovations, we need to know and care about the people who
4. Illustrate the key parts of the design thinking process.
5. Demonstrate how to observe and convert observation data into insights.
An insight in this sense is an interpretation of an event or observation that, importantly,
6. Demonstrate how to interview potential customers in order to better understand their
needs.
7. Identify and describe other approaches to design thinking.
The authors of Designing for Growth suggest four questions that are useful to ask during the
design thinking process, all of which have periods of divergence and convergence. They are:
What is? What if? What Wows? What works?
i
Another variation on the design thinking process