Design Thinking, Entrepreneurship & Innovation from a Social Impact Point of View with Selena Griffith – UNSW

In this episode Selena Griffith (Senior Lecturer in Design Thinking, Entrepreneurship and Innovation) and I passionately speak about ‘Skills Currency’ and how this forms the foundation of 21^st century career success. We discussed and unpacked detailed answers on questions such as what is Design Thinking? What is the impact of this in any given industry? How does this facilitate innovation? How does it create and manifest itself with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship? How and why this is important for the next generation of future leaders as well as how the education system should align to facilitate the design thinking approach and mindset? Tune into this episode for one of the most eye-opening topics from a social impact point of view from one of the leading design thinking experts and educators in Australia.

Selena is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney Faculty of Art and Design currently seconded to Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Business. She is an experienced Design Thinker and entrepreneur. She facilitates innovation, entrepreneurship and cross-disciplinary collaboration. As a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Social Impact she teachers Social Innovation and Design for Social Impact. As a Senior Lecturer of Design Studies at UNSW Engineering she founded courses in Start Up and Entrepreneurship and led innovation in Education for enhanced student experience. As a Senior Lecturer of Design Studies at UNSW Art and Design she coordinated courses in Design Management and Practice, Identity, Branding, Sustainability, Whole Systems Design and Cross Disciplinary Collaboration for Innovation. Originally qualifying for a Bachelor of Industrial Design, Honours, Selena has worked as a Design Manager in a variety of contexts from in-house to international consultancy and in her own consultancy.

Griffith researches in Design Management, Sustainability, Collaboration, Social Innovation, Futures and Education. Her interest in creating positive futures through transformative design thinking as led her to produce tools and methods to assist with the development of innovation, collaboration and design thinking skills. Selena is very interested in how organisations can most effectively utilise design thinking to deliver more sustainable products and services. Co-creation and nexus - where people from different backgrounds and professions come together in collaborations that result in innovation or new perceptions has fascinates Griffith and she not only researches in this area but has also developed courses to teach the skills needed to run multidisciplinary creative collaborations.

Griffith was awarded a Global Future Leaders Award from the World Human Resources Development Congress in 2011 and has been accepted into the highly competitive Buckminster Fuller Institute's Catalyst Program for her work on The Island Innovation Lab

Selena is also:

• PLuS Alliance Fellow 2019- 2020

• Fellow of The Sydney School for Entrepreneurship

• Fellow of the European Academy of Design

• Member of the Design Management Institute

• Faculty Advisor for UNSW ENACTUS Social Entrepreneurship program

• Co-Founder of Social Innovation Sydney

• Co-Founder of Creation Nation

• Alumni Australian Institute of Company Directors

• Alumni Planning Committee of the UNSW Women in Research Network

• Alumni UNSW Academic Women in Leadership program

• Alumni of the UNSW Early Career Research program

• An Executive member of the Society for Responsible Design 2007 - 2019

• Coordinator of the COFA Annual 2009 – 2011

• A Participant in the UNSW Faculty of Excellence Initiative – developing and testing effective online learning programs across UNSW