Clearsight Advisors Participates in Dent Education’s Design Thinking Workshop

Clearsight Advisors Participates in Dent Education’s Design Thinking Workshop

Learns how the methodology can make an impact in business and in the community

Design Thinking, an exploding methodology and approach in the consulting and product development industries, has the potential to make the process of solving complex problems and innovating more effective and rapid. We hear this refrain on a daily basis from clients, strategic buyers, and investors focused on consulting and digital transformation. But it’s also something we experienced firsthand when Dent Education guided Clearsight through a design thinking boot camp at our offices in McLean, Virginia.

Dent Education is a Baltimore-based non-profit co-created by Jackie Bello and Rajan Patel focused on teaching the skills of entrepreneurship to marginalized, yet extraordinarily gifted and promising youth. The program relies heavily on the process of design thinking as a foundational tool to tackle unknown or ill-defined problems, as well as build confidence in students. Dent’s signature program that it helped found, Bet on Baltimore, is an eight week, intensive program where students are encouraged to employ their design thinking skills to empathize with members of their community and identify needs. They then hold brainstorming workshops, create prototypes, and learn how to use 3D printers, milling equipment, and other tools. Through the process, students are equipped with the necessary skills and become empowered to make a difference.

“The challenges these students face are enormous, and it’s clear that Dent is making a real impact in the lives of these young people,” said Bhavin Patel, Director and Co-Founder of Clearsight. “I came away from the workshop not only with the knowledge of how the design thinking process can facilitate creative business solutions in a non-linear fashion, but also an appreciation for the impact that the methodology can have in our local communities.”

“One of Clearsight’s core values is ‘Impact,’” Joel Kallett, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Clearsight Advisors, explained. “In everything we do, we seek to improve the lives of our clients and of those in our communities. Clearsight is tremendously proud that its employees are showing their support to local non-profits through their contributions and time.”

The session taught Clearsight employees how to apply the steps of design thinking to business projects. The methodology’s five stages (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test) are the components of an iterative process that correspond to steps in a creative project. And many of our clients, especially those providing software development and digital transformation consulting (two services requiring frequent creative problem solving), profess the advantages of design thinking’s principles. Now that we’ve experienced firsthand how design thinking works from Dent’s session, we hope to be among those teams that are able to leverage the process to our and our clients’ benefit.