Day 3: Creativity and Pushing Boundaries
Editor’s note: The Innovation Odyssey Blog is produced by students in the Innovation Odyssey course, taught by Assistant Professor of Practice Stephen Brand. The course featured a trip to Silicon Valley in January 2025 where the students met with executives and leaders in the tech industry. Each blog will be about a specific day of the trip and the students’ experience. This post was written by the team of Jerry Gao ’25, Vaness Gardner ’26, and Lisa-Claudia Levy ’27.
On Tuesday, January 14, 2025, our cohort visited the Stanford Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), IDEO, and Netflix. These three visits highlighted the role of creative endeavors in Silicon Valley, painting a cohesive picture of how design thinking, collaboration, and bold leadership intersect to drive innovation. While each institution operates within a distinct sphere—education, design consulting, and entertainment—together, they revealed a shared commitment to human-centered thinking, adaptability, and a willingness to challenge conventions. By visiting all three organizations, we uncovered lessons that amplified our understanding of effective innovation in an ever-changing world and reinforced our beliefs about the importance of creativity and design.
Human-Centered Design: The Foundation of Innovation
Walking into the Stanford Design School was unlike anything our class had ever experienced before. While the ethereal historic church in the courtyard outlined the essence of the Stanford campus, the d.school drew a sharp contrast in that its industrial interior design reminded us of a world where innovators create for the greater good. While touring the school, our cohort also participated in a tailored prototyping workshop led by Perry Klebahn, an educator at the school who also served as the Chief Operating Officer of Patagonia. When teaching us about prototyping, Klebahn reminded us that it is essential to idea generation and that a successful product takes about 21 prototypes on average. Hence, students must be open to pivoting, and every prototype should yield a lesson learned. His insights fundamentally shifted our way of thinking, as some of us recalled the various prototypes we made for our businesses or for FME, and how we didn’t compartmentalize the lessons-learned aspect.
Later in the visit, Klebahn also allowed us to write our business ideas on a whiteboard for feedback within the defined categories of “Founder Name,” “Target Audience,” “Pain Point,” “Key Feature,” “24-hour experiment,” and “Results.” As many of our students have startups of our own, we eagerly wrote on the whiteboard to get his feedback. After looking at our ideas, Klebahn gave us an eye-opening moment, when he said, “If your business’s target user plus pain points are solid and grounded in passion, but your key feature isn’t the best, you’ll be fine. However, if your target audience and pain point are not solid, then you will fail regardless of the key feature.” As many of us have attempted to start businesses, Klebahn’s workshop retrained us in identifying the priorities of our product design. With all this transformative knowledge, Klebahn’s workshop will forever follow us along our entrepreneurial journeys.
After d.school, the cohort took a bus ride to IDEO, a design consulting firm that helps the world’s leading organizations with products, with its contributions to the Apple Mouse being one of the best-known projects. At IDEO, students learned the design process involved inspiration (framing a question and gathering information), ideation (generating ideas and making ideas tangible), and implementation (test to learn and share the story). The cohort also saw various prototyping equipment such as Bambu Lab 3D printers, bandsaws, and laser cutters. Through various company case studies from Senior Designer John Won, students were reminded that creativity and innovation are deeply connected with the values of delivering social good. Some students also related the company’s office space to the Weissman Foundry and reassessed how, perhaps, they also would be able to use the Foundry to initiate design projects for their own businesses in the future.
After the quick lunch break following the IDEO visit, the cohort then departed for the last stop of the day: Netflix. It was immediately obvious that the atmosphere at Netflix was different from the previous two locations. The tall ceilings, LED strip lights, and badge scanners emphasized the “corporate-esque” side of a creative industry. At Netflix, students were greeted by two Babson Alumni, John Gesimondo ’12, a software engineer, and Cori Allen ’12, a Product Manager. The pair led the students into a meeting room that resembled a Roman theater and began sharing their experiences. From the conversations with Gesimondo and Allen, students learned that John had built a course registration software for Babson, which led to his role as a software engineer, while Cori worked for various startups and became a product manager after taking a coding boot camp. With this information in mind, students not only learned about the organizational structure at Netflix, but they also grasped that most of the time, careers are not straight and narrow paths but rather a collection of experiences that could lead to many surprises. For some of the Seniors in the group, it was surely beneficial to know that they have the time to find the most suitable career path, even though it may be different from what they will pursue after graduation.
Collaboration and Creativity: Turning Ideas into Action
The environments at d.school, IDEO, and Netflix all share a commitment to fostering collaboration. One thing all of these places had was space to expand. As people in business, our creativity can oftentimes get stifled by low ceilings, gray cubicles, and retina-scratching white lights.
All three of these spaces had a unique way of configuring their space to ensure things seemed more open. D. school had no podium, no lines of seating to be lectured in, just an open space with a few tables surrounding the edge. Perry said that this layout enabled students to flourish while he was working beside them, instead of talking at them. He mentioned if he wanted to lecture them he would just send them a video to watch.
IDEO had a similar feeling. They had tall ceilings, an industrial but pleasant aesthetic, posters of all kinds on the wall as we walked in and plenty of room to move around in and share ideas. My hypothesis is this plays a major role into the productivity and output of the team. The sheer amount of effort, time, and resources all three of these spaces put toward cultivating an intentional workspace was clear and you could feel the effects. People more open, happy, willing to talk to new people, explore new ideas, etc. This is something that is hard to come by on the East Coast.
The synergy between creativity and teamwork came alive in different ways at each stop. At the d.school, we learned that effective collaboration begins with creating safe spaces to experiment, fail, and iterate—a lesson mirrored in IDEO’s own prototyping process. Netflix, however, took this one step further by showing how trust and autonomy fuel not just creativity but also accountability. Its “freedom and responsibility” culture allows individuals to take ownership of their ideas, ensuring that collaboration is both dynamic and results-driven.
The overlap of these approaches inspired us to rethink our team dynamics. We saw how empowering individuals with space, trust, and responsibility while providing tools for collaboration can turn big ideas into actionable strategies.
Adaptability and Bold Leadership: The Keys to Sustained Innovation
If empathy and collaboration form the foundation of innovation, adaptability and bold leadership are the engines that sustain it. The d.school encouraged us to embrace a mindset of constant iteration, where solutions evolve through feedback and refinement. IDEO echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that no idea is too big or too small to be reshaped through iterative design. Netflix demonstrated the transformative power of adaptability on a global scale, having redefined itself multiple times in response to shifting markets and technologies.
At each stop, the underlying message was clear: innovation demands not only creativity but also the courage to pivot when necessary. The d.school’s “fail early, fail often” mindset prepared us to see failure as an opportunity to learn, while IDEO’s culture of experimentation reinforced that risk-taking is essential to break through ideas. Netflix stood as a testament to these principles, having transitioned from DVD rentals to a streaming giant, and later into a producer of original content—all driven by its leadership’s willingness to disrupt itself before others could.
Together, these lessons emphasized that true innovation is not static. It requires a willingness to challenge assumptions, adapt strategies, and make bold moves—all while staying grounded in a vision that serves real human needs.
A Unified Framework for Innovation
Reflecting on our visits to the d.school, IDEO, and Netflix, we were struck by how interconnected their philosophies are. Each organization operates in different contexts but shares a commitment to pushing boundaries, empowering individuals, and keeping people at the heart of their work.
- From Vision to Execution: The d.school taught us how to approach problems with empathy and curiosity. IDEO showed us how to translate that understanding into solutions through collaboration and prototyping. Netflix, finally, demonstrated how these principles can scale, proving that bold leadership and adaptability can drive sustained success.
- A Feedback Loop of Innovation: What begins as a seed of human-centered insight at the d.school is cultivated through IDEO’s collaborative design process and realized at scale through Netflix’s culture of experimentation and disruption. Each institution builds upon the others, creating a cycle of learning, application, and growth.
- Innovation as a Collective Process: The visits collectively reinforced that innovation is not an individual act but a team effort fueled by shared values and diverse perspectives. Whether it’s brainstorming at d.school, co-creating at IDEO, or executing bold strategies at Netflix, the journey from idea to impact is one of interconnectedness and mutual reinforcement.
Posted in New Tech Ventures Blog
