Inventor Nikola Tesla's name is in the history books -- and on today's hottest car -- because of his work with electricity. Without Tesla, we might not have an electric grid today. But his career as an inventor started much smaller -- at the age of nine, with a better way to beat an egg. It wasn't a hand-cranked beater, or one that relied on electricity. Instead, young Nikola's egg-beater was powered by the movement of captured bugs.
Tesla's early kitchen gadget stands out as the fruit of "design thinking," an approach to problem-solving that recognizes that there are multiple paths to a solution -- that there's more than one way to beat an egg.
It's more important than ever today, when the problems facing our world are so complicated that overcoming them may require multiple solutions, all deployed at once. Design thinking starts by challenging people to be empathetic -- to put themselves in the end-user's shoes. Solutions aren't imposed from on high; they come from the bottom up.