Audrey Crane is author of the new book, What CEOs Need to Know About Design: A business leader's guide to working with designers and a partner at Design Map. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Audrey about some of the trends in Design Thinking, how to hire better designers, and what are some of the differences she's seeing in the Midwest versus the Silicon Valley design scene.

Interview Transcript. (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Audrey Crane. Audrey is a partner at Design Map and author of the new book, What CEOs need to know about design: A business leader's guide to working with designers. We had a great conversation talking about some of the trends in Design Thinking, how to hire better designers, and what are some of the differences she's seeing in the Midwest versus the Silicon Valley design scene. Now on with the show. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Audrey Crane. Audrey is a partner at Design Map and author of a new book called What CEOs need to know about design. Audrey, welcome to the show. 

Audrey Crane: Thank you so much Brian 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show because you've been recommended by half the people that I know in this design and lean startup space as a person I should have on the show to talk about what's going on. For folks who may not have heard of you, give us a little background on you and how you got into this design space and what's keeping you busy right now. 

Audrey Crane: My background goes back a while, actually. I studied math in theater in college. I was actually in college when I saw the Mosaic browser for the first time. I was using muds and like old fashioned nerdy stuff like that. I had always worked in high tech though my father and my mother were both computer programmers and so my summer job was QA and stuff like that. I came out to California to act and got a day job at a little company called Netscape. So yeah, happily, most people have still heard of it. I'm still waiting for the day when some young person has not. I was there and I met Hugh Deverly, who was a huge influence on my life, a really big deal. He's not great at self-promoting, but a really big deal inside the design world, and he was a designer by trade and training and kind of showed me the world of design and marriage of right brain and left brain, really worked for me. It really resonated. When he left to start Deverly design office, I went with him and was incredibly lucky to be the first employee there. Was there for quite a while. I left and went internal and ran my own design team and then left again and joined Design Map as a partner nine years ago now. I head up the research arm of Design Map. Many people with lots of experience and skills there, but I pitch in there where I can and then do show up in client engagements when I'm helpful and try to go away when I'm not. That's my job.

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