Shinhan Future’s Lab invited budding start-ups and aspiring entrepreneurs to join Chris Elkin, Founder, Doodle Brands for an interactive, live-streaming, ‘Design Thinking for Innovation’ Workshop.
Nowadays, innovation is everyone’s business. Whether you are a manager in a global corporation, an entrepreneur starting up, in a government role, or a teacher in an elementary school, everyone is expected to get lean – to do better with less. And that is why we all need design thinking. At every level in every kind of organization, design thinking provides the tools you need to become an innovative thinker and uncover creative opportunities that are there – you’re just not seeing them yet.
“In our rapidly changing world, leaders of all types of organizations – startups, corporations, not-for-profits, government agencies – need to understand how to innovate. To encourage each other and overcome together. Contrary to popular belief, innovation is often not the result of random lightning strikes, but rather the practice of the right mindset, methods and tools.” Chris Elkin told Vietnam Insider.
In a remote workshopping and Q&A session of the “Design Thinking for Innovation’ Workshop, over 100 participants were taken on an interactive journey to learn the basics of Design Thinking mindsets and methods – A human-centered design mindset and methods to frame and solve your problems and to make your customer compass
Here’s a taste of what the participants got to learn…
How to start applying some versatile Design Thinking mindset and methods to…
- Provide teams with repeatable ways to innovate their start-up
- Promote productive collaboration across teams
- Offer creative alternatives to traditional methods
- Help uncover deeper customer insights
- Guide and informs future ways of working
- Inspire an innovator, customer-first mindset
Part of the session shared what the key behaviors of an innovator are Questioning, Empathetic, Collaborative, Imaginative and visual.
The participants were also introduced to some fundamental ways of visualizing how to frame problems and solve problems better together, in more human-centered ways, including using the Double Diamond of Design…

Double Diamond of Design (Design Council U.K.)
Chris Elkin also shared a summary of Doodle Brands 3-Step Approach to innovation.
- To ‘Look again’ – to uncover and make clear what customer problems really need solving in these fast-changing times.
- To ‘Understand’ – to help gain stakeholder inputs, swift alignment and a shared way forward together.
- To ‘Do (doodle)’ – to make a desired future solution together with customers.
A range of Design Thinking methods was also shared, including how these methods could be facilitated remotely, through new remote-working tools, such as the game-changing digital white-board & workspace, MURAL.
“We use MURAL every day to collaborate and co-create internally, with clients and our client’s customers. We use it to plan, to brainstorm new ideas, to evaluate work, to help align and make better decisions and to capture customer empathy too.” Chris shared.
Last but not least, a live-stream Q&A session was held with the participants to answer any questions they had and discuss further how they might start to apply Design Thinking to their every-day work & life challenges…

A final live-stream Q&A in progress
More information about Chris and Doodle Brands can be found at: https://doodlebrands.co/