Design thinking can solve the world’s problems

I love stories like this one from Business Week:

In Polak's approach to solving poverty, poor people are treated as rational customers rather than as recipients of charity. Among other things, that means IDE develops only products that will pay for themselves in the first year through the buyer's increased productivity. One of the best examples is IDE's $25 treadle pump, a human-powered pump that enables a family working two to six hours a day to irrigate a half-acre of vegetables during the dry season and earn an average of at least $100 a year after expenses.

I’m a big believer that design thinking isn't just for new products and services; it can be applied to any problems, including the big ones in the world.

We need to do a better job of training people in the skills of design thinking, but we also need to encourage these people to go into diverse fields such as politics, public policy, social work, law enforcement, etc. Only then can we throw out the old systems and replace them with innovative new ones that actually work. One can argue the success of this program actually came from redefining the problem which led to these better solutions:

"Development leaders were outraged by my notion that you can and should sell things to poor people at a fair market price instead of giving things to them for nothing." But the case that Polak has made over the years, and that he makes in this book, is persuasive: The only sustainable, scalable approach to fighting poverty is to give poor people a way of increasing their income; to treat the poor as potential entrepreneurs, rather than as recipients of charity.