In a bright classroom on UCT’s Middle Campus, a handful of participants huddle around a whiteboard while a coach walks the room offering quick pointers. The scene is the opening of d-school Afrika’s new three-day Design Thinking in Practice course, a hands-on training that promises to move small business owners and entrepreneurs from theory to real change.
According to the programme outline, the course runs over three days and costs R19 500 per participant. It is deliberately kept small, with a coach-to-participant ratio of 1:6, meaning each attendee receives personalised, real-time feedback. Over the three days, participants move through the full innovation cycle: they start by building empathy with the people affected by a problem, then frame a challenge that truly matters, generate ideas, create low-cost prototypes and test them quickly and cheaply. The programme says the aim is to cultivate an experimental mindset that values learning and iteration over perfection.
What participants can expect
Design thinking (a problem-solving approach that starts with the user) equips teams with practical tools such as journey maps, empathy maps and “How Might We” framing. The course provides ready-to-use templates that participants can apply in their organisations the very next day. After the in-person sessions, the programme offers three monthly online group coaching sessions to help graduates implement what they have learned, stay connected and build momentum. Graduates receive a certificate of completion.
The value proposition is clear for SME owners who often juggle limited resources and the need to innovate. In South Africa, many small businesses lack a structured process for turning ideas into marketable products or services. A hands-on method that forces teams to test cheap prototypes can reduce the risk of costly failures. The coach-driven format also addresses a common gap: the shortage of experienced mentors who can guide teams through ambiguous problems.
While the description sounds promising, it remains a claim by d-school Afrika. The promise that participants will leave more comfortable navigating ambiguity and better equipped to move ideas off the whiteboard is based on the programme’s own statements, not on independent verification. Potential attendees should weigh the cost against the expected return, especially given the R19 500 fee.
Applications close on 9 November 2026, and interested professionals can apply through the d-school Afrika website. For SMEs looking to inject fresh thinking into product development, service design or internal processes, the programme offers a structured, low-risk entry point. Whether the investment translates into measurable growth will become clearer as the first cohort completes the course and reports back on results.
What design thinking actually is, stripped of the workshop language
Beneath the specific vocabulary, journey maps, empathy maps, the framing device known as How Might We, design thinking is built on one underlying discipline: it insists on establishing what a real, specific problem actually is, from the perspective of the person experiencing it, before allowing any discussion of a solution. That ordering is the entire method. Most business problem solving skips straight to solutions, because generating solutions feels more productive than sitting with an unresolved problem, and design thinking’s structured process exists specifically to resist that impulse for long enough that the eventual solution is aimed at the right target.
The cheap prototype step follows the same logic in reverse: rather than building a complete, expensive version of an idea and finding out it was wrong after the money is spent, the method deliberately builds the smallest, roughest version that can still test whether the idea works, and treats being wrong early and cheaply as the entire point of the exercise rather than a failure of it.
Why a structured methodology matters more for a small business than a large one
A large corporate typically has a dedicated product, research or strategy function whose job is precisely this kind of structured problem investigation, whether or not it is formally labelled design thinking. A small business usually does not, and the owner or a handful of staff carry that function informally, often without a repeatable process, which means good decisions can depend heavily on individual instinct rather than a method the whole team can apply consistently.
That gap is the actual value proposition behind training of this kind for a small business audience specifically: it is less about introducing a genuinely new idea, since testing assumptions cheaply before committing resources is intuitive to most experienced operators, and more about giving a team a shared, repeatable language and process for doing something many already do instinctively but inconsistently.
