How Design Thinking Can Help Lower the Poverty Rate

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West Virginia has one of the five highest poverty rates in the nation and among the four highest rates of household hunger. But there's a new spark of hope, as one of its native sons - a former Fortune 500 CEO in Silicon Valley - has returned and introduced design thinking as a way to solve tough problems. His championing of that approach holds great promise for the state and may well position West Virginia as a model for the entire nation.

For 11 years, Brad D. Smith was CEO of Intuit, the software company that provides financial services like TurboTax and QuickBooks. Instead of retiring into the California sunset, however, Smith took a different path. In January 2022, he became president of his alma mater Marshall University, one of West Virginia's public research universities.  Marshall is based in Huntington, a city of 46,000 people that has endured decades of decline due to its waning coal and manufacturing industries. As a core part of his strategy to turn things around, Smith is instilling design thinking - Silicon Valley's methodology for innovation - with the university, its students, and his native state. Design thinking can work, the reasoning goes, because it provides a way for anyone to tackle any problem through a process of exploring possibilities, learning from failure, and iterative experimentation.

I caught up with Smith recently while on a road trip that I took - from Baltimore to Kansas City - in my role as founder and CEO of Right to Start, the national nonprofit organization championing entrepreneurship as a civic priority. That's exactly what Smith's doing at Marshall University.