Design Thinking for Business and Management

A practical guide to using design thinking to navigate complexity, drive innovation and create human-centred transformation across organisations.

Design Thinking for Business and Management by Dr Mersha Afta explores how design thinking can be used as a strategic capability to address complex challenges, foster innovation and enable organisational and digital transformation. This essential textbook and practitioner guide is for final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as managers, consultants, technologists, digital transformation professionals and organisational leaders.

This textbook explores:
- Design thinking principles, methods and tools for addressing complex organizational challenges
- Systems thinking and approaches to navigating complexity and transformation
- Digital transformation, emerging technologies and AI
- Empathy and human-centred approaches to innovation and organisational change
- Ethical, social and sustainability considerations in responsible innovation
- Creativity, collaboration, leadership and organizational resilience
- International case studies demonstrating design thinking in practice

Students are supported by learning activities, reflective exercises and practical tools throughout the book. An accompanying Design Thinking Methods Toolkit provides methods, templates and exercises that can be applied in education, workshops and professional practice, alongside downloadable online resources and a comprehensive glossary.

With a foreword by Dr. David Hands, Design Thinking for Business and Management positions design thinking not simply as a problem-solving process, but as a way of thinking, leading and responding to change.