Design Thinking, Enterprise and Innovation: Strategies for stimulating creative hubs and making an impact on city regeneration

This paper examines the role of design in change management, economic development and urban regeneration. Based on the premise that traditional business models no longer fit our time, the paper describes an experimental journey into ways of finding new route maps for creative venturing. In doing so it examines the evolutionary pattern of an emergent strategic design community of inquiry, learning and practice and its role in socio- economic problem solving and value creation.The research methodology focuses on the delivery of a Design Direction Practice Project that employs design attitudes for navigating complexity. The project is concerned with the creation of a social innovation hub where designers and non designers work in concert on envisioning solutions to complex problems; international research partners act as mentors and local stakeholders provide context and steer the project in an advisory capacity. The research concentrates specifically on the formation of a creative city hub. It employs a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to the application of design sensibilities for stimulating community innovation. It also initiates leadership that galvanises partnerships; combining academic, economic, social, and industrial and professional groups for social action.The key findings of the research demonstrate design as a principle source of innovation, the basis for new approaches to socio- economic sustainability and renewal. The study establishes design as a metaskill, the enabler that makes tangible the possible, while differentiating design thinking as the cognitive aid to dealing with the flux of events and adapting accordingly. The research describes an ecosystem where design is central to setting directions that result in original strategies. It identifies critical factors that facilitate design led leadership skills including the ability to appreciate the ‘big picture’ and articulate the architecture of multifaceted problems from the outset. In doing so it interrogates the role of design in generating alternatives and providing integrated solutions. Consequently the study arrives at a conceptual model that describes the relationship between creativity, design and innovation, with particular reference to the role of design thinking in cultivating entrepreneurship within a cultural context.The main implication of the research is the uncovering of a rich, still largely untapped, mine of inquiry as to the use of design in response to the challenge of galvanising knowledge sharing, learning and change so as to stimulate dynamic innovation in its broadest sense. Design Direction is an action research project that sets out to chart a creative journey in order to gain new insights that will lead, in time, to the formation of principles to guide strategic design practice. So far the findings are that critical to addressing a big problem is a collaborative approach and the ability to assemble manage and lead interdisciplinary communities. However this is still an ongoing exploration that seeks to redefine design sensibility, to go beyond the conventional sense of design thinking and practice, to encompass change and synthesise new knowledge from different domains so as to better tackle 21st century complexity. Published conference paper from the Tsignhua – DMI International Design Management Symposium, Hong Kong, December 2011