Discovering New Opportunities
Craig Sampson built his career on design thinking. As an adviser for Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program's Business Innovation Lab, he helps challenge partners understand its power and how it influences the type of insights MMM students will uncover.
When Craig Sampson sees a problem, he likes to step back to try and see what’s causing the problem.
If you've ever approached a door and tried to pull the handle, even though the door clearly says "Push" on it, you may think you were the one at fault. From Craig's perspective, it was the door's mistake—or more specifically, the door's designer who put the handle, instead of a push plate, there in the first place. A good designer considers the user’s perspective.
That consideration of the user’s experience is a hallmark of design thinking—the foundation behind Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program—a dual-degree program between Northwestern Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management. Craig built his 30-plus-year career with design thinking, including more than 20 years at global design and innovation company IDEO, where he founded and led the Chicago office. Today, he is founder and principal consultant at TBD Innovation, where he helps companies innovate and create new products, services, and businesses.
His forthcoming book, How Might We?, will be published by Manuscripts Press in January 2027.
Craig is also an adjunct lecturer in MMM and advises the program's signature Business Innovation Lab (BIL). BIL offers students the chance to apply what they learn in class to actual industry business problems provided by leading global organizations.
One of Craig’s most important jobs is to ensure those organizations understand what they are going to learn from the students’ efforts.
“It’s important that they don’t see themselves as the client. They are our challenge partners, and I’m very specific in using those words,” Craig said. “If they think, ‘I have this problem, and I want a few smart MMM students to give me the answer,’ then they don’t realize the journey they are about to go on.”
The journey, Craig said, is about much more than smart answers, and instead goes back to the concept of design thinking. It’s about first reframing the opportunity in a human-centered way.
Some businesses, for example, want help learning about their customer's demographics—questions that can be answered with research. What is more important—and what challenge partners get from MMM students—is an understanding about those customers' motivations, interests, behaviors, wants, and needs.
When a major US retail pharmacy chain came to MMM wanting to know who was coming into its stores to peruse the seasonal aisle, Craig cautioned them about the findings they would receive.
“Our priority is the student's learning, so I told the company representatives that, yes, the team would look at their question,” Craig said. “But the students are also going to think about who those customers are beyond demographics and in terms of what might be the occasion and what might be their mental attitude. Are they walking in the door thinking they’re buying a gift, or are they stumbling into this?”
In other words, the challenge partner received more than just who was in the aisle; They were shown distinct living customer personas and scenarios of different occasions. These were translated into actionable retail ideas that could meet those customers where they were while also promoting and leveraging the seasonal aisle.
“Our challenge partners often come back and go, ‘Wow, I didn't know we were going to get all that,’” he said. “They realize they didn’t just hire a bunch of MBAs to come back with some quantitative summary. I never know what the outcome will be from a BIL project, but what I can guarantee is that our students will identify deeper human insights about how their customers think and feel, and great ideas for things that the partner might do about it.”