John Storm, Founding Partner at Outlander Consulting, has built on foundations laid by our training team via his role at the University of Aberdeen to gain recognition for our workshop series in design thinking, specifically aiming to kickstart sustainability initiatives in entrepreneurial start-ups and SMEs. An overview of the workshop series has been published in the proceedings of an online conference based in the United States.
Abstract: Sustainable development is rooted in proactively understanding and inclusively acting upon the needs of stakeholders – including inanimate objects like printer ink and trees. Grounded in design thinking’s emphasis on ‘Empathy’, this paper proposes a structure that educators, corporate trainers or Executive Education facilitators may employ within the context of an interactive workshop for stimulating sustainability-orientated initiatives in SMEs.
The proposed structure initially develops an interactive map of a company’s stakeholders, upon which facilitators are guided through a process that aids workshop participants to recognise, understand and engage with their organisations’ lesser emphasised stakeholders and explore opportunities for kick-starting a new sustainability-orientated project. The workshop subsequently proceeds to guide participants through design thinking’s steps of Ideate, Prototype and Test, wherein participants will explore realistic starting points for embarking on their sustainable journey. The workshop closes with participants preparing to obtain feedback from core stakeholders prior to kickstarting the project.
Recognising that Outlander Consulting training content incorporates and builds upon pedagogical learnings from numerous experts in their fields, the effort was made to reciprocate and offer some of our learnings back into the wider world of trainers and educators. Full proceedings may be accessed via the following:
Storm, J., (2021) A Design Thinking Workshop to Kickstart Sustainability Initiatives: For Entrepreneurs and SME Leaders. In T. Bastiaens (Ed.), Proceedings of EdMedia + Innovate Learning (pp. 407-412). United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved August 19, 2021 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/219686/.