Creative Confidence

David Kelley

Founder, IDEO

“Creative confidence is the notion that you have big ideas, and that you have the ability to act on them.”

Anyone can approach the world like a designer. Often all it takes to unlock that potential as a dynamic problem solver is creative confidence. Creative confidence is the belief that everyone is creative, and that creativity isn’t the capacity to draw or compose or sculpt, but a way of approaching the world.

Creative confidence is the quality that human-centered designers rely on when it comes to making leaps, trusting their intuition, and chasing solutions that they haven’t totally figured out yet. It’s the belief that you can and will come up with creative solutions to big problems and the confidence that all it takes is rolling up your sleeves and diving in.

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David Kelley

David Kelley is a founder of IDEO and the d.school at Stanford University. Together with his brother Tom Kelley, David wrote the book “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All” in 2013. He has won the Sir Misha Black Medal for his “distinguished contribution to design education.” He has also won the Edison Achievement Award for Innovation, the Chrysler Design Award and National Design Award in Product Design from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineers.