The HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program strives to apply rigorous academic methods to understand how and why Design Thinking innovation works and fails.

Multidisciplinary research teams from Stanford University and HPI work on diverse topics concerned with Design Thinking, its process, method, interaction patterns and tools in order to investigate the phenomena of innovation.

All research findings are published in the volume "Understanding Innovation" as well as in various papers and articles.

Dr. Harald Sack

Dr. Harald Sack is Senior Researcher at the Hasso Plattner-Institute for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) at the University of Potsdam.
After graduating in computer science at the University of the Federal Forces Munich Campus in 1990, he worked as systems/network engineer and project manager in the signal intelligence corps of the German federal forces from 1990 - 1997. In 1997 he became an associated member of the graduate program 'mathematical optimization' at the University of Trier and graduated with a PhD thesis on formal verification in 2002. From 2002-2008 he did research and teaching as a postdoc at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena and since 2007 he has a visiting position at the HPI.
His areas of research include multimedia retrieval, semantic web, knowledge representations and semantic enabled retrieval. SInce 2008 he is speaker of the special interest group 'multimedia- and hypermediasystems' of the german computer science society (Gesellschaft für Informatik) and general secretary of the german IPv6 council.

Greeting Note

"We must strive to improve our understanding of innovation processes in order to bring better solutions to society more quickly."

Prof. Hasso Plattner

Publications

New: Achieving Real Innovation

We proudly present the 13. volume of our book series titled „Design Thinking Research: Achieving Real Innovation”. It compiles the latest research results of the HPI Stanford Design Thinking Research Program.

Here you'll find an overview of other publications.

Hybrid Book Launch

On September 14, 2022 the HPDTRP researchers gathered in D-Space to celebrate the publication of "Design Thinking Research: Achieving Real Innovation,” the newest publication in the Springer series: Understanding Innovation. Professor Meinel initiated a toast to honor the hard work of all researchers. Contributing authors from HPI and from Stanford University had a lively exchange regarding the new publication and many other topics. Such events help keep ties within the community strong.

Here is an overview of additional publications.

Community Building Workshop

From September 14 to 16, 2022, researchers from HPI and Stanford University met for the 27th Community Building Workshop.

Read more