Rick Perez, explains how most companies are unaware of where waste fits into their balance sheets. “Waste should be a saving, not an expense,” he says.

These days there’s a lot of talk – and a lot of executive education – revolving around “design thinking.” Companies like Apple, Netflix, Facebook and others are disrupting industries and business models left and right. And with these developments comes the realization that traditional approaches to problem-solving are no longer enough.

So, across industries around the world, attention is shifting to design thinking as an approach for unleashing creativity and innovation in organisations.

But what is design thinking?

Although the stereotypical image of “the designer” is often an egocentric, domineering aesthete, design thinking is actually highly collaborative process that has relatively little to do with visual appearance. 

As defined by the Stanford University Institute of Design, the design thinking process consists of five steps:

1. Empathize – working to fully understand your customer through observation and interviews
2. Define – synthesizing findings from the previous step to form a “user point of view”
3. Ideate – structured brainstorming of possible solutions
4. Prototype – giving a physical, digital, or diagram form to selected ideas
5. Test – putting prototypes into practice to see if they meet the user needs identified at the beginning

Unlike analytical thinking, which focuses on the problem at hand and considers how current resources and knowledge might fix the problem, design thinking focuses on the ultimate goal, apart from whatever the current situation might be.

According to Melissa Rancourt, academic director of the Global Executive Master’s in Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design, this focus on future goals rather than current constraints “challenges the status quo and forces you out of your comfort zone”. Using creative design processes, “you often end up completely discounting existing problems, instead uncovering an unexpected approach that could ultimately lead to an entirely new business model.”

Rancourt adds that a process like this needs must necessarily tolerate – and even embrace – ambiguity and failure. “The iterative nature of design thinking assumes that multiple possible solutions and prototypes will be explored and tested simultaneously, and ideas are bound to be modified and even discarded along the way.”

How is design thinking being implemented in the business world?

Sure, there are companies like Airbnb or Uber that are founded on design thinking. It’s natural in smaller companies. But Rancourt explains that large businesses operating within traditional industries are now training their staff on design thinking. “Even if they don’t immediately implement design thinking across the board, they are setting up design-thinking teams,” she explains. “These groups are given the freedom to think totally out-of-the-box and test out solutions that might be expanded across the organisation.”

When you think about it, the exec-ed classroom is an ideal place not only to learn about design thinking, but also to actually participate in it first-hand. In any exec-ed programme worth its mettle, you’re not going to find a lecture-style setting where a professor stands in front of the room and dictates the right answer. 

Instead, you’ll be working through a set of highly experiential exercises together with people from a diverse set of professional backgrounds. Each participant contributes different ideas, and immediate feedback and vetting leads to those ideas either getting discarded – refined into creative, innovative, design-led solutions.

Laura Montgomery is a higher-education expert who blogs for The Economist Careers Network.

From farm to table, much about food production has changed – for both farmers and consumers. Like any other business, farmers must adapt to a changing world –one that will see its population grow to 9.6 billion by 2050.

With finite resources, it will take innovation and a variety of technologies to meet the world’s food demand. This includes using new technologies like biotechnology (also referred to as genetic engineering), which can help produce more food on the same amount of land, without having to destroy wildlife habitats.

A 2014 study by the International Food Information Council (IFIC), “Consumer Perceptions of Food Technology,” shows that more than seven in 10 consumers agree that modern agriculture –conventional farming using today’s modern tools and equipment — can be sustainable and produce high-quality, nutritious foods. The survey also underscored that two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents say it is important that their food be produced in a sustainable way, including producing food affordably with the same or fewer resources, in a way that is better for the environment.

“When consumers understand the potential benefits that technology in food production can have for both people and the planet, they can get behind it,” said Marianne Smith Edge, MS, RD, LD, FADA, and senior vice president of Nutrition and Food Safety at IFIC. “People need to know what’s in it for them.” To this point, of consumers who ranked these factors of sustainability as important, most believe there is a role for biotechnology:

* Ensuring a sufficient food supply for a growing global population

* Producing more food with fewer natural resources

* Conserving the natural habitat

* Reducing carbon footprint

To address increasing interest in how our food is produced, IFIC Foundation provides a glimpse of modern agriculture in its new animated video, “Your Food, Farm to Table,” showing how farmers in the U.S. and globally are working to produce our food year-round, including using technology to safely produce more food, while putting less stress on our natural resources. With more “precise” information at their fingertips, farmers can be more selective with supplies and resources such as fertilizers, pesticides, tractors and other fuel-run equipment, and irrigation water. As a result, they can reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, pesticide applications, soil erosion and water run-off — in turn, improving sustainability.

German company GNS GmbH, a leading developer of embedded location and mobile electronics technology, has announced the launch of a Kickstarter campaign for Fitti Guard, a new generation of fitness and environmental tracker that will warn wearers about poor air quality and even radiation threats.

Fitti Guard is the first environmental sensing and protection device that you can wear on your wrist.
It comprises ten sensors that help identifying and avoiding unhealthy situations such as ultraviolet light exposure, poor indoor air quality, radioactivity and noise nuisance. A vibration alarm and warning icons inform the user as soon as a threshold of exposure has been exceeded. The watch is aimed at improving health and well-being in people’s daily lives.

Advanced fitness functions count your steps and calculate distance and calories, much like many other smartwatches. But Fitti Guard goes one step further with an activity recognition algorithm, based on a neural network, that detects the kind of activity you’re performing. Tracks are recorded with an integrated GPS and a barometric level sensor measures the covered elevation. A sleep tracking function helps support a healthy and conscious lifestyle with wearers only needing to charge the battery every 21 days.

“This unique activity GPS watch combines fitness and additional health functionality in a single stylish device offering protection from daily environmental influences,” says Bernd Bierwisch, CEO and founder of GNS GmbH.

“We are very proud that our engineers were able to integrate reliable UV and air quality sensors in such a small device. Fitti Guard will even give a warning if sun protection is required, or to open a window if the indoor air quality is bad – based on WHO recommendations.”

Fitti Guard was available for pre-order from the end of March on Kickstarter and shipment is planned for the end of 2016.

Organisational leaders have a growing stack of priorities on their desks. Now among them is information security, which until relatively recently, was a responsibility delegated to IT departments.

That began to change in May 2014 when Target’s CEO Gregg Steinhafel resigned in the aftermath of a data breach that exposed the credit card and personal details of 110 million customers of the mega-retailer. The scale of the breach was unprecedented and cost the company at least $252 million. It was the first time a high-profile corporate leader had been ousted for failing to act promptly after a cyberattack. “Suddenly, business people took notice,” says Dr. Dale Meyerrose, president of The MeyerRose Group and lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research, where he directs the Cybersecurity Leadership (CSL) Certificate programme.

The number of breaches is actually declining each year in many industries, according to Meyerrose, but the number of records compromised in each attack is growing, mainly because hackers are becoming more selective in their targets. The threat of significant damage to an organisation’s brand and its finances is forcing cybersecurity onto the C-suite agenda. Executives stepping up to lead on this issue should start by following these five steps:

1. Realise it’s not a technical problem

Most organisations approach information security from a technical perspective. But this is the wrong strategy, argues Meyerrose. The primary threat is human behavior – the vast majority of data breaches originate with employees, former employees or service providers giving access to hackers, wittingly or unwittingly. In the case of the Sony breach in 2014, for instance, employees allegedly let hackers into the building where they stole the system password. Target’s system was penetrated via a multi-step campaign that started with hackers gaining access to a Target vendor’s account by way of a deceptive email.

Companies need to conduct employee training regularly and meaningfully, addressing topics like social engineering and how behavior can leave the door open to infiltration.

2. Hire the right experts at the right level

Although the number of Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) is growing, many of them still report to the CIO or a chief security officer. They are usually technical experts who are hired for these skills, explains Meyerrose. But organisation leaders and boards are slowly realizing that the ideal CISO also needs to understand the business in order to assess risk factors and explain data in a compelling, understandable way to a non-tech audience. Moreover, they need to be positioned at the right level, ideally that of a senior business manager who has direct access to the C-suite and can affect enterprise-wide changes.

3. Pick an architecture and apply it well

Research shows that over 90 percent of businesses have an information security risk framework in place, but compliance with minimum criteria does not necessarily mean secure. There are numerous standards, many of which are industry-specific. Meyerrose stresses, however, that the type of architecture is not as important as picking one and applying it in a systematic way: “any framework gives you structure, runs you through processes and forces you to answer questions.” Security rests on the architecture being implemented completely and being built on logic and economic principles.

4. View cybersecurity as insurance

Since most companies still consider information security a technical risk to be managed as an IT function, they view it as a cost centre. Yet a good cybersecurity programme insures an organisation against the enormous losses that a hack attack can cause, says Meyerrose. As such, it deserves adequate investment and prioritisation. Cybersecurity insurance is a fast-growing area of the insurance market, and many organisations now purchase coverage. Still, building strong security safeguards remains the best policy, adds Meyerrose.

5. Prioritise threat assessment

Big data analytics are increasingly used to identify information security threats. Meyerrose believes the emphasis should be on profiling the company’s own activity since most breaches originate on the inside. This means each company needs to do data analysis on itself and its “eco-environment”, including partners, customers and vendors. When an organisation carefully profiles its activities and authorised users, it can more easily detect anomalies that red-flag intrusions. It’s also useful to do analyses on the industry and global trends to predict risks.

Meyerrose’s cybersecurity courses at Carnegie Mellon cover three areas: leadership of cyber-enabled organisations, understanding the fundamentals of cybersecurity (e.g., insider threats, cloud computing, big data analytics), and examining cybersecurity from a management standpoint versus a technical one. This kind of training might become standard for all leaders who want to guide their organisations well in the 21st century.

By Kate Rodriguez. The original story appeared on The Economist Executive Education Navigator