Sanjeevani Ayachit, Officiating Director, SID Pune

SID is one of the best designing colleges in Pune which offers fashion designing and industrial design courses in India with the best faculty and training facilities.

There’s a paradigm shift in the way innovation and design thinking has created a place at the center of an enterprise. The shift is not only about aesthetics but also how innovation can be applied to the way people work. This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business.

Education is the stepping stone where innovation and creativity are forged. Promoting creativity and incentivizing innovation through different courses is the first step towards broadening the career choices that can help students hone their skills. Rapid advances in new technology, new courses, changing economy, sets the stage for pioneering innovations.

A popular term that is being used formally in businesses and design institutes to encourage students to become more strategic thinkers is ‘Design Thinking’ At the heart of design thinking sits the need for developing strong curiosities, and fostering the desire to understand and solve complex problems. It encourages empathy and optimism and embracing ambiguity.

In a similar way, there are other ways in which education institutes are helping young students understand the importance of innovation that helps them in their career and businesses they work with to solve complex business problems.

“Promoting creativity and incentivizing innovation through different courses is the first step towards broadening the career choices that can help students hone their skills”

• Exploring an Intersection between Creativity and Critical Thinking

Generally speaking, creativity is associated with generating ideas, while critical thinking is associated with analyzing them. In practice, however, the two are not so easy to separate. It is fundamentally creative in the sense that its aim is to produce something new: an insight, an argument, and a new level of understanding. Let's take the example of a course in Product Design. It is the process of imagining, creating, and iterating products that solve users’ problems or address specific needs in a given market. A careful insight of the end-user’s requirement, analysing the demand, consumer behavior, need of the market and empathy along with creativity is required to make a product design successful.

• Adopt a Collaborative Approach

A business has employees from various backgrounds working together in teams. At an institute level, when students have the platform to interact with industry stalwarts and peers from different educational backgrounds it enables students to become more strategic in their thinking and support students from other disciplines (such as engineering, business and science) to think in a more design-led manner thus leading innovative problem solving skills.

• Let technology be your Companion

Every time a new product is developed in the market, technology plays a key role in the process. For any prospective career in recent times, it is important for students to build the latest technology skill set merged with their core competencies. For example, in terms of spatial design or industrial design it is important to factor in sustainable designs backed by technological support to improve energy efficiency.

• Motivating and Aligning Efforts

It is natural for young college graduates to feel lost while solving business problems. Constant motivation and aligning your efforts towards the goal to be achieved makes the walk easy. A design centric organization empowers employees to observe behaviors, analyze them and then draw conclusions.

• Creating Models and Prototyping

Each product has a certain target audience and solves their pain points in some way. To evaluate whether the product really solves its users’ problem, a prototype is created and tested with the prospective users and stakeholders. Communicating the look and feel of a project to the management helps in identifying complexities much sooner and solving the issues ahead of time in the final product.

• Fostering an Entrepreneurship Spirit

It is often beneficial to think like an entrepreneur while defining a business problem. Innovative thinking comes naturally when you think from the perspective of a business owner. Understanding this while pursuing your education helps act out of your own interest and define the problem based on the parameters of the world that surrounds you.