Building entrepreneurship skills in Design Education.

Today in this Modern Entrepreneurial and knowledge bound world; A question that I ask myself as a designer is — “ Should I only know how to generate ideas according to my brief, use and learn the software to develop my product or instead as a designer I should see the connections and challenge the brief and push back and create something disruptive to what’s in the market right now”

The design education mostly focuses on design skills, originality, and creativity, in brief, an idea or viable concept that can be produced or distributed to the market. Sometimes students’ talent — the creative challenges and client-facing issues are not enough to sustain a design career if it is not supported by proper design entrepreneurship and management. So, building entrepreneurship skills in design students is very much important. A designer’s work is not over by just creating innovative product ideas by conventional design skillset until and unless he/she also knows to organize and operate a plan through idea into a physical profitable product by initiative skills.

Entrepreneurship skills would help us to recognize the economic opportunities while we design a product and act upon them. This includes the ability to take a risk, being innovative, change-oriented designs. Management skills are the ones that will help in administering the company and in the day-to-day management of the company. The management skills that are required in design education are planning, decision making, motivation, marketing, finance, and selling.

According to research, almost twice as many people who regard self-employment as a feasible prospect in the next five years had followed an entrepreneurship course (34% compared to 18%). However, less than half of citizens feel that their design education helped them to better understand the role of entrepreneurs in society (47%) or gave them the skills and know-how to enable them to run a business (41%). Only 28% of respondents agreed that their design education made them interested in becoming an entrepreneur.

What is an entrepreneur? Let’s go by definition; An entrepreneur is who starts a new business in response to identified opportunities. An entrepreneur is a risk-taking, business-minded visionary person able to build from scratch a project to fulfill their own creative drive, with the activation of all of the strategies and procedures needed to enter the idea in the market and drive profit needs. Features that a professional designer knows very well.

In fact, by definition, the designer is a figure capable of moving with confidence between the context of the problems to solutions with broader culture and interdisciplinary skills, so it could be easily associated with the capabilities and characteristics of an entrepreneur. It’s capacity to analyze, user focus, his strategic vision, his iterative methodologies, and his propositional thinking are melting day by day with the tech/engineering-centric world driving the latter into better and successful solutions. A good designer excels in iteration and in problem-solving, he manages to walk with a balance between the needs of the final users, collaborators, and clients. The designer is close to the mindset of the entrepreneur because it has a T-shaped skill and an open-mindedness able to be contaminated by diversified knowledge. So, the designer is an entrepreneur even if he doesn’t know. So With the changing role of a designer, Entrepreneurship skills should be developed as life skills rather than an economic activity.

Entrepreneurship education is essential not only to shape the mindsets of young designers to empower them but also to widen the design role in the cultural debate around innovation and entrepreneurship community.

When I (a building designer) was first introduced to the Entrepreneurship World, I found it very intriguing. Everything around was something that I needed to incorporate in my designed product to sell it further and then I realized that how essential it is to not only know the design aspect of the product or an idea but also the entrepreneurial skills. It is a need of the hour to include entrepreneurship skills in design education where the world is under constant change, as never before, in every sector from economy, politics, culture, technology, art, society, education.

Entrepreneurship is an indispensable action or condition of design practice. So designers should be encouraged on entrepreneurial skills to establish high-growth-oriented ventures and to be self-employed and practiced on the management processes to produce viable concepts and marketing their intellectual properties

Unlike other important economic skills, entrepreneurial skills are not related to a specific occupation, discipline, or qualification. However, the greater emphasis on entrepreneurship education and developing entrepreneurial skills has brought more analysis and agreement of entrepreneurial abilities and competencies. Building entrepreneurship skills in design education act as a glue that is able to put science, technology, business into the same path with the possibility to transfer knowledge in practical innovation by creating products and services desirable, feasible, and sustainable. Faster we will able to foster this approach, sooner we will be able to innovate, seizing business opportunities in the market with the introduction of models, technologies, products, services that meet society, economy and real environment needs with an impact on the well-being of the humankind.

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