This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 1 The Nature of Design Thinking in Academia and Industry Seda Yilmaz * , Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness, Tejas Dhadphale Department of Industrial Design Iowa State University Ames, IA, USA *Corresponding author e-mail: seda@iastate.edu Design thinking has gathered increasing momentum in both academia and industry in recent years. It has been a central mission of many books, journals, conferences and symposia (Brown, 2008, 2009; Cross, 2011; Cross, Dorst, & Roozenburg, 1992; Lawson, 1980; Martin, 2009; Rowe, 1987; Stewart, 2011). Business management magazines and books have covered stories about the power of design thinking, suggesting it provides significant value for business innovation (Beckman & Barry, 2007; Brown, 2008; Cooper, Junginger, & Lockwood, 2009; Leavy, 2010; Martin, 2009; Stacey, Griffin, & Shaw, 2000; Ward, Runcie, & Morris, 2009). This rapid transition of design thinking from design education and practice to its new interpretations and implications for business management, and other disciplines, especially, has raised new challenges. Design thinking is touted as a cure for every ill in business (Hassi & Laakso, 2011), has been dilution (Badke-Schaub, Roozenburg, & Cardoso, 2010), and has started to lose meaning (Cross, 2010; Johansson & Woodilla, 2010). In design circles, “design thinking” was originally defined as the cognitive processes of designers (Cross, 2011; Lawson, 1980; Rowe, 1987). However, today, it is associated with a mind-set and a methodology for solving complex and even wicked problems in diverse contexts beyond design. The expansion of underlying principles to business management offers an exciting new paradigm, but requires new explorations of definitions, frameworks, toolboxes and suggested best practices for integration to support its cross-disciplinary implementations and effectiveness. There are many attributes that define the characteristics of design thinking, such as tolerating and embracing ambiguity, viewing design as an inquiry, maintaining “the big picture” through systems thinking, and handling decisions as part of a team (Dym, Agogino, Ozgur, Frey, & Leifer, 2005). All of these characteristics require an important attribute: