Design Thinking as a Catalyst for Technology Start-Ups
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This study is based on the projects held in a Design Thinking Graduate class in 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 Fall Semesters, in an industrial design department. Based on the hypothesis that design thinking interventions to entrepreneurship projects will help their development, graduate students were paired with technology start-ups. The aim of the project is to intervene the project development process of technology start-ups with a human centred perspective by the help of the tools of design thinking approach, develop ideas for solving existing problems, also pin out new problems that are not classified as problems by the companies yet. Following this idea, students were required to design and conduct their own process by the help of design thinking approach and related methods. The number of the projects held during the process was 34 and 4 of them will be explained in detail in this paper. This study is significant in terms of investigating how design thinking affects start-up culture as a catalyst, in which phase/s of the projects design thinking is more relevant and effective, how design thinking helps find solutions to missing and premature aspects of entrepreneurship projects.