Design-driven entrepreneurship: a cooking exercise to integrate effectuation and design thinking

This paper presents an experiential learning exercise to (a) Provide students with an effective analogy of the way entrepreneurs identify opportunities and solve problems in the development of new products, (b) Help them to reflect on the importance of defining a Creative Workflow in entrepreneurial endeavors, and (c) Encouraging students to practice Empathy. The proposed exercise is built on using cooking as a metaphor for design-driven innovation. The exercise design is grounded on effectuation, human-centered design, and pedagogic approaches relying on co-creation and prototyping (Aalto Design Factory, 2017). The exercise was created during the pandemic as part of a broader attempt to migrate an entrepreneurship course online. Since the course intensively used prototyping and design exercises, there was a need to find effective ways to transfer these teaching experiments to a virtual environment. The exercise was demoed to academic instructors during a virtual international conference on design-driven innovation. The experts’ feedback and reactions were collected through the video recording of the session and follow-up conversations. This paper will present the exercise in detail, lessons learned, and reflections extracted from the demo session.