NEW DELHI: Newly hired trainees at Infosys ' Mysuru campus are “design thinking”, in line with chief executive Vishal Sikka ’s vision for a more focused and competitive organisation.The new module, which was introduced for several new batches in the past month, has struck the right chord with the trainee engineers, who are excited about the possibilities this approach presents for them. “It was great fun doing the module. What really got me interested was that the focus was not just creating a solution within boundaries of a programming language, but also visualising the utility of the finished product for a customer,” said an employee currently at the Mysuru campus.He refused to be named, because the trainees aren’t allowed to speak to the media. Design thinking is generally understood to involve a creative and systematic approach to problem-solving by placing the user at the centre of the experience.Many see the influence of Hasso Plattner , co-founder of Sikka ’s previous employer SAP and his mentor there, in the new CEO’s emphasis on this exercise at Infosys. At the company’s quarterly conference call on October 10, Vishal Sikka had said design thinking would be taken to all Infosys employees at the Mysuru and other development centres.In the new modules, Infosys employees are shown a video detailing how design thinking has helped big corporations in the real world solve customer problems. This is followed by sessions on understanding and empathising with fellow employees, identifying their problem, defining the problem statement, ideating, defining a solution, getting feedback and redesigning, and finally building a prototype.Design thinking has been adopted by large companies such as Google and Apple , and is increasingly being embraced by startups and other new enterprises, because it focuses on people as opposed to processes when dealing with customers, and is not limited by conventional industry boundaries. However, not everyone at Infosys is as excited.“We were only given a session on design thinking for about twothree hours, and it all happened in a rush, leaving us no time to absorb things. The later batches had a full day for this,” said another employee at Mysuru. “I am not sure if such a short session would provide any real value add to our work.”