Do Individuals Benefit from Design Thinking Training? A Quasi-Experimenal Field Study in an Aviation Company

Design thinking has been gaining increased attention as an approach for creative problem solving and innovation, which has increased the necessity for and the offer of design thinking trainings. Existing research examining its effects in educational settings has shown improvement in certain skills, yet more rigorous research is still called for. Furthermore, typical trainings in companies are much shorter than business school courses, which might hamper skill development. In a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design field study with a control group and a 5-month time lag, we test whether design thinking training indeed has positive individual level outcomes crucial for innovative behavior. We find that design thinking training can increase employees’ creative-self efficacy, creative problem solving, tolerance for ambiguity and anti-perfectionism. Our study contributes to the design thinking literature by empirically showing its positive effects on individual level outcomes within a realistic company setting.