Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education

Appendix 4Franco-Russian Research Project on the Perceived Relevance of Design Thinking Education¹

As the design thinking (DT) approach becomes more widespread not only among startups, but also among mature companies, demand for DT as a discipline has increased in business education. The integration of design thinking requires not only skilled employees familiar with its principles, but also significant changes in the management system and corporate culture. In order to assess the perceived relevance of DT in France and Russia, French business school SKEMA partnered with the Russian Foreign Trade Academy (RFTA) to implement an international research project involving 180 students (55% Russian and 45% French). All students were working as interns or apprentices (involving 105 companies). All respondents had a formal training in DT principles and were thus in a unique position to observe how these principles were applied in the companies they worked for.

The sample mainly consisted of large companies operating in various industries, such as luxury, technology, biotechnology and energy. A common online questionnaire was used as a research tool in France and Russia. The main topics were the perceived relevance of DT in the activities of the firm and the perceived effectiveness of this approach in various functional domains.

The results obtained in the two countries are surprisingly homogeneous. Most of the study participants (87% of French respondents and 84% of Russian respondents) ...