Tech investor Chris Moehle is the former Associate Director for New Ventures at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center. Currently the managing director of The Robotics Hub in Pittsburgh, Chris Moehle supports entrepreneurs innovating in the robotics space. A large part of this effort grew out of Chris’ learning at Carnegie Mellon, one of the earlier pioneers in an approach called “Design Thinking”

Innovations often face a plethora of challenges, many of them brought forth by humans hesitant to change. According to the Harvard Business Review, for innovations to succeed, they have to provide two things: superior results and lower risks/costs associated with change. For innovators seeking to create efficiency, applying these two tenets is not easy. Fortunately, there are ways to ensure innovations offer superior solutions at minimal cost. This has been a classical hallmark of “design thinking.” With this approach, innovators follow an structured, more deliberate path to inventing, without over narrowing scope. It incorporates many of the traditional early start up processes of customer discovery, idea generation, and testing.

For customer discovery, innovators immerse themselves in their customers’ lives, walking in their shoes to identify obvious and hidden needs. Then, they make sense of the data gathered by prioritizing the most important data points. Finally comes alignment, where the team asks,” What job should the new invention do well?” This sets the stage for idea generation. At that point, carefully chosen participants brainstorm on potential solutions and then challenge the implicit assumptions of each in order to weed out impractical ones. Once a final set of possible solutions is arrived at, they can be tested on users, with emerging winners undergoing continuous refinement.

Historically design thinking has been most associated with product design. However, a large part of The Robotics Hub’s methodologies and portfolio management approach is based of off applying design thinking to company building. This allows the approach to tackle a much broader subset of a startup’s early tasks than just discovery, generation, and testing. After five years in business, it seems that this unique and proprietary approach is well suited to maximizing the dual economic and social impact of the firm’s time and portfolio.