Kevin Bethune: Innovation lessons from a nuclear engineer turned Air Jordan designer

Not many people can say they’ve gone from being a nuclear engineer to helping design Air Jordans at Nike. But that’s part of Kevin Bethune’s story, and today we chat with him about his journey from engineering to design.

Kevin also published a best-selling book last year called Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation. We talk about what he hoped to learn from writing the book, and discuss a critique of design thinking, the role of rigor in creativity, and the rewards and challenges of working with multidisciplinary teams.

Bio

Kevin Bethune is a Design & innovation executive leader serving, scaling and leading creative teams as large as 30+ nationwide, and influencing global teams as large as 70+ in the definition of design functional excellence and innovation best practices while respecting local differences.

He’s also an entrepreneur and founder of dreams • design + life, a “think tank” combining strategic design and industrial design to address human-centric and holistic opportunities to solve latent needs across industries that benefit from integrated physical, digital and service-oriented experiences.

Kevin is a globally recognized speaker who’s given talks at TED, DMI, IDSA, AIGA, MIT, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Notre Dame, ArtCenter, Lucerne, Nike, BCG and Google Design. 

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