Stanford's Fresh Entrepreneurship Factory - Forbes

If you could get people who love the values of design thinking — such as the push to turn ideas into prototypes that customers can use — to apply its principles to new business building, you’d produce more winning entrepreneurs. That’s the premise of the Stanford Design School’s Launchpad program — a 10 week course consisting of 20 assignments to which students from all over Stanford can apply. On May 25, I interviewed Launchpad’s co-founders Michael Dearing — a former eBay (EBAY) executive who earned his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School — and Perry Klebahn, formerly chief operating officer at Patagonia with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford who invented a market-leading snowshoe.

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21 Evidence Based Ideas About How Great Bosses Lead Innovation - Stanford d.school

My Stanford colleague Hayagreeva (Huggy) Rao and I have been leading an executive program at Stanford every November for the past four years that is called Customer-focused Innovation. In the mornings, we discuss the theory and practice of innovation with the executives. In the afternoon's, Perry Klebhan from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (which everyone calls the Stanford d.school) leads the group as they go out into the world to try to tackle read world problems -- such as improving the experience of visiting a gas station or buying a car. For this program, Huggy and I put together a list of 21 evidence-based ideas about how great bosses lead innovation. We would love to hear your ideas about ways great bosses spark innovation as well a concerns -- and extensions -- related to these ideas: 1. Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.

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