As a digital consultancy we’ve been helping our partners and clients design demand for over a decade – everything from breathing new life into their brands to inventing entirely new digital products and services. Although every engagement has had its own unique design challenge to solve for, we couldn’t help but notice a pattern quietly starting to emerge.

Regardless of the project’s ask, the industry, or even the life-stage of the business they all seemingly faced the same root problem. While the rapid evolution of technology has created new possibilities for businesses, it has evidently done so at the expense of the people’s ability to collaborate and effectively apply critical thinking to the problems they were aiming to solve. To put it bluntly – we realized that creativity and curiosity were broken in business.

We’ve seen even the most innovative folks be handcuffed by old ways of working, resource limitations, or simply a lack of shared context, whether it be with their customers or even their own teammates. Those systemic problems inevitably lead to the onset of status quo, which at the end of the road means you’re fighting to keep up instead of focusing on paving the way forward.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. We believe that most complex problems in business can be solved when we focus on leveraging our innate sense of wonder, empathy, experimentation in new ways. Methodologies like Design Thinking have begun to change the conversation, but we need more commitment to design “doing” to really see its effects, and that calls for more than being an army of one in the sea of the many.

Following ourlaunch of District New Haven, we’ve seen the power that building a community for technology & innovation can have on the future; for people individually and entire fields.

Today, we’ve decided to take it one step further. We’re excited to announce the official launch of thinkFWD – a new initiative focused on bringing together a community of like-minded teams, visionaries, and innovators who share our passion for driving change. From hosting interactive events to releasing our very own innovation curriculum and toolkit of resources, our goal is to deliver the education, resources, and know-how needed to start driving innovation in organizations and businesses everywhere.

This article can also be found on DigitalSurgeons.com.