Entrepreneurship Education Based on Design Thinking and Technology Commercialization in Japanese Universities

These days, significance of open innovation is increasing since business environment is changing rapidly. In addition, the role of startup firms is becoming important because of their agility and flexibility to create new innovative businesses. In this context, design thinking attracts attention from many areas of industries, since it gives an effective and systematic way to induce human centric innovations. In top universities in Japan, in order to foster innovative human resources, entrepreneurship education programs based on design thinking is now under development. In this paper, current status of novel approach of entrepreneurship education based on design thinking is overviewed. Processes characteristic to design thinking, i.e., "problem finding" and "solution finding" have been well implemented in many universities' programs, however, they are not well connected to following practical processes like "examination of business plan". We also discuss the shortage of current entrepreneurship education based on design thinking. For example, at present, they are not closely related to the processes of technology commercialization, which is one of the most important issues in universities with engineering departments. Essential differences between activities based on design thinking and technology commercialization are analyzed, and some examples of implementation are introduced.