Today`s society is increasingly opposed to wicked problems, such those concerning social,
health or environmental issues. To handle these complex challenges in a holistic and
sustainable way we need more innovations to deal with their multiple impact. D.schools
have developed a specific human-centered training that enables students to deal with
wicked problems (Rittel, 1973) and to come up with innovative ideas for these type of
problems. The educational goal is to enable students via a design thinking process to
become future innovators. We suppose that an important element of the education is to
address the student´s creative self-efficacy. Our observation at the Potsdam and Stanford
d.schools shows evidence that creative self-efficacy can be mediated by methods, trained
tools and via specific settings, such as working within multidisciplinary teams in an open
space, etc.. We surmise that creative self-efficacy is a cornerstone for the personality of a
future innovator. In brief, building on Bandura, creative self-efficacy refers to one’s own
believe in his creative abilities. Without this belief we cannot even try to ideate, develop or
implement a service or product, nor will we innovate. To check in a quantitative way if
creative self-efficacy is really significantly addressed in d.school training we measured this
skill at D-school Potsdam with a nine items questionnaire.
In this paper, we discuss the results of a longitudinal study over eleven months. The aim is
to gain insights into whether d.school education adresses creative self-efficacy, and if so,,
are there changes regarding student´s creative self-efficacy with a design thinking
education at the School of Design Thinking in Potsdam (D-school)?
With this aim in mind, this study is a first step on this promising way to contribute to the
discussion on how to train a future innovator.
DRS 2012 Bangkok
