Can Design Thinking make our graduates more readily employable? Are there education / skilling funds that may be interested in partnering to take the bull by its horns? Ideafarms presents a case for consideration. Only a fraction of India's graduates are employable according to a 2016 National Employability Report by Aspiring Minds, there has been "no significant improvement in employability in the last four years" thereby suggesting we rethink the national education and skilling strategy.

1. Building the last piece of the
Design Thinking to build a new type of workforce
to help close the endemic gaps between Education and
Employability.

2. 2016 2
Sad truths
Only 7 per cent of MBA graduates from Indian
business schools, excluding those from the top 20
schools, get a job straight after completing their
course.
Out of 15 lakh Engineering graduates India
produces every year, 20-30 per cent of them do not
find jobs and many other get jobs well below their
technical qualification.
ASSOCHAM Study1
The National Employability Report 2013 pegged that
employability was less than 25% in almost all job
functions across education streams—science,
commerce arts et al.
ASSOCHAM Report2

3. 2016 3
The real
Problem
Employability of Technical Graduates
A National Employability Study IT/ITES
Sector has found that employability with regard
to IT product companies is as low as 4.22 %
(amongst computer/electronics related
branches), whereas employability with regard
to IT services companies is 17.84% (wherein
the company gives 3-6 months of in-house
training) which is lower than the advertised
figure of 25%.
To be at the forefront of innovation and achieve
higher growth, it is necessary that higher-order
work with regard to product development and
research grows in India apart from the services
industry.
62% graduates require further training to be
eligible for any job in the IT/ITeS sector.
Majority of these graduates are employed in low-quality, backend type of
work doing repeatable IT Management or Support tasks. As automation
increases, a bulk of these roles will be eliminated or opportunities will
shrink.
Data points leading to the opportunity

4. 2016 4
1. There is high demand for design and design related interventions in
the business world.
2. Design capacity is inadequate both in terms of numbers and quality.
3. Focus on user touch-points has become critical as consumers are
empowered via mobile technology.
4. Design has become a business priority. It also fits directly into the
#StartupIndia and #MakeInIndia initiatives of the Government of India,
thereby making it an imperative for ensuring a sustainable ecosystem of
entrepreneurship and innovation.
5. Indian technology majors are moving up the value chain towards
replacing IT administrative type of services to more profitable business
consulting services.
6. Globally, companies are moving towards using Design Thinking and
Design as key drivers of
growth through
innovation. Design
Thinking, in particular,
provides tools and
methodologies for human-
centric innovation and
business consulting as is
borne out by the
investments made by
Infosys, IBM and SAP, to
name a few.
7. How India’s higher education system responds will determine the
long-term employability of our future generation of graduates PLUS
India’s ability to retain and grow its foothold on the global tech landscape.
8. Design Thinking is a methodology that can be learnt and leveraged by
Engineering, Management, Commerce and Liberal Arts graduates
being a human-centric capability and hence applicable across societal
challenges.
Business Case
1. We need institutions to expose students to Design Thinking and provide
some form of certification to encourage companies to employ
graduates with this capability.
2. In order to create scale, courseware needs to be created, standardised
and templatised for it to be replicated easily with assured confidence
and quality.
3. The business model will allow Government and Private institutions to
sign up and offer these courses on a license plus a flexible subscription
into content, courses and online webinars, among others.
Google has risen in its perception
for design quality due to a series
of actions that have been ongoing
over the last decade.
Fortune 100 companies are
elevating design as a priority at
the executive level.
Source: KPCB’s Design )n Tech Report 6

5. 2016 5
We are looking for financial and institutional support as well as charter
partnerships for creating the initial course content and technology
platform(s).
Next Stop, Design
Design is trending, and bringing in lots of
designers and employing design thinking is
very common and very popular.
Design can be the bridge between what Business needs and Technology
currently offers, even in the startup ecosystem. We often see companies
struggling with design management.
India is the world’s fastest growing startup ecosystem shouts the headline of
a recent blog article on thenextweb.com and goes on to highlight the role of
enablers -
Indian Startup Ecosystem Enablers
Startups in India have given rise to more startups. Enablers like
NASSCOM and iSpirit bring together key stakeholders of the ecosystem
including startup incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture
capitalists, support groups, mentors, and technology corporations.
Their main aim is simply to provide funding and support for startups,
besides providing growth advice and decision-making tools. From
advising on government policies to act as market catalysts, they grow the
maturity of young ventures.
The role of Design as a key enabler is starkly missing from all
startup conversations. Evidently, the above enablers are
blindsided to value of design, perhaps still believing its role to
be limited to good-to-have, aesthetic interventions, rather
than something intrinsic to the product, culture and
processes essential for world-class quality.

6. 2016 6
There’s a fine line between innovation and
design. Ideally, design leads to innovation
and innovation demands design.
— Indra Nooyi

7. 2016 7
Design Thinking @Ideafarms
The future of business is up to us. And Design will help take us there.

8. Further Reading
1. India – the world’s fastest growing
startup ecosystem
2. KPCB’s Design In Tech Report 6
3. How Indra Nooyi turned Design
Thinking into strategy
Ideafarms is a Gurgaon based Design-in-
Tech Consulting & Advisory that first
brought the value of Industrial Design
approaches to software, keeping the user’s
experience at the centre of all its thinking.
The company’s ethos combines empathy
with strong technology competencies to
highlight the value of interdisciplinary work.
Ideafarms has the distinction of partnering
with some of the largest global corporations
to help drive strategic value through its
human-centric approaches to problem
solving.
Ideafarms designs and executes short-cycle
business mock-ups for its clients and
customers—labeled Design Fiction—a tool
to help them arrive at quick and accurate
investment decisions.
Ideafarms runs Design Thinking
Workshops, for corporates, colleges and
NGOs to help them become more customer-
centric and agile in their approaches to
problem solving.
CONTACTS
sunil.malhotra@ideafarms.com
C 94A, South City 1, Gurgaon. 122001
Haryana. India
+91 124 407 5513, +91 124 422 0929
1 http://www.assocham.org/newsdetail.php?id=5651
2 http://yesinstitute.in/Compendium/Re-
imagining%20Higher%20Education%20in%20India.p
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