Engineering Education and a New Paradigm of Project Thinking

In the article the author substantiates the importance of the approach of project thinking in the training and education of future professionals for the digital economy. Development of entrepreneurial abilities, creative thinking, ability to work in a project team, to make decisions in unusual situations - all these important competencies must be obtained during the training of students at the University. The article presents the experience of design seminars, especially the use of popular tools of design thinking to create projects of Internet entrepreneurship, recommendations for the introduction of the approach of design thinking (DT) in engineering education. The author describes in detail one of his cases “Search for sources of ideas”. DT can redirect from the usual ways of judgment about the object to the unconventional solution. They help develop an innovation that is based on empathy for the pain of the consumer, including one that is still unconscious to prevent his hidden needs and create a breakthrough product for him. It is important to learn how to accept even the most ridiculous at first glance the ideas of their colleagues, which can trigger your best idea. In the case we used tools of design thinking, such as random stimulus technique, the technique of personal ideas, World café, “good and bad ideas”, etc. Each point of the case contains comments on how the new idea was developed, what difficulties arose with this or that tool, what ways we found to get the team out of the deadlocks.