ABSTRACT
This book chapter proposes design thinking as a fundamental methodology for instilling entrepreneurial mindset among university students, empowering them through their problem-solving and opportunity-finding journey, and fostering future-of-work competencies. It discusses the competency and skills gap between higher education and employability and highlights the importance of designing pedagogies for teaching entrepreneurial methods and mindsets to university students. Moreover, the study uses “Fuel Africa,” a 9-day educational program built on design thinking, as a field of experiment and reports on the potential impact of design thinking as a teaching and learning pedagogy to build entrepreneurship mindset. The study concludes that engaging students in a collaborative design thinking workshop experience across different cultures resulted in the cultivation of an entrepreneurial mindset. This experience empowered them to navigate their problem-solving endeavors and identify opportunities, thereby augmenting their competencies for the future of work. The authors propose the adoption of design thinking as an instructional pedagogy to nurture future-of-work skills among students from various disciplines.
