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How might we build better employment opportunities and pathways for young people around the world?

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Phase: Ideas Missions: Get Back on Track

Youth Design Thinking Workshop to Jumpstart New Business Ventures

Use a Youth Design Thinking Workshop to Discover and Launch an Innovative Business in any Field of Endeavor.

Photo of Avi Solomon
11 14

Written by

Stanford Design Thinking Virtual Crash Course
Extreme By Design – Watch & Do: Being an Innovator
Extreme By Design - Watch & Do: A Real World Challenge
Design Thinking workshop with Justin Ferrell of Stanford d. School at The Irish Times
Design Thinking: How to Bring Empathy and Experimentation into Your Work Today
Lean Startup Meets Design Thinking
The design sprint
Corey Ford, Matter
The advantage of youth lies in the ability to harness an amazing amount of energy to disrupt and reinvent the existing world.
Design thinking is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.
Young people can participate in a Design Thinking Crash Course to come up with gamechanging prototypes for every aspect of their lives and then push through to make their disruptive new products and services real. The Design Thinking Crash Course can be held locally or virtually.

Design Thinking Workshop Components:
  1. Design Methodology
  2. Empathy & Insight
  3. Point of View
  4. Ideation
  5. Visualize & Prototype
  6. Iteration & Testing
  7. Business Launch

Resources:
Stanford Design Thinking Virtual Crash Course
PBS Extreme By Design - Watch & Do
Acumen Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation Course
IDEO Human-Centered Design Toolkit
IDEO Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit
Stanford d.school Ramen Experience Design Project
Stanford d.leadership Design Thinking Workshop
How To Conduct Your Own Google Ventures Design Sprint
Personal Design Sprint II: Food Tracking

Who does this idea benefit, who are the main players and what's in it for them?

Help young people prove their entrepreneurial initiative, collaborative skills and professional dedication. Teams could form around promising ideas that could then be prototyped, tested, demoed and considered for early-stage startup funding.

How is your idea specifically increasing access to employment opportunities and pathways for young people?

Help young people prove their worth (regardless of formal academic qualifications) in a real-life project that allows for quick learning from failure and rapid pivoting to promising new opportunities.

What early, lightweight experiment can you try out in your own community to find out if the idea will meet your expectations?

Organize a Design Thinking workshop. The Acumen Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation Course can be leveraged to test the idea by the target youth audience.

What skills, input or guidance are you keen to receive from the OpenIDEO community to help you build out or refine your idea further?

Organize and participate in a Design Thinking workshop. Form teams and join the upcoming Acumen Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation Course.

The idea emerged from:

  • An individual

How do you envision your idea being implemented?

  • I'm more throwing the idea out there to inspire potential implementers

Attachments (1)

Ideo-Human-Centered-Design-Guide.pdf

IDEO Human Centered Design Guide

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11 comments

Join the conversation:

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Photo of Umrah
Team

Avi,
I think your idea really hits the nail on the head here! Sometimes, all that is needed for youth to really push through their limitations of professional exposure and engaging the skill set and creativity they already have lies within the educational context that is designed to support them. A design workshop as you've suggested could potentially expose thousands of students to realize and develop their ideas from early schematics and conceptualization to realization. The ability to create a forum where students can build confidence behind new ways of thinking and feel supported is key! Your idea cultivates collaboration, excitement and self-esteem to name a few. Maybe a healthy dose of competition could be added into the mix to get the youth's juices flowing-I would love to support you in anyway possible. As an architecture student, I have experience with organization and familiarity with design charrettes.

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