This instructional technique review paper outlines an opportunity for sport management instructors to integrate design thinking as a pedagogical tool into their classrooms to align with the demands of today's innovative and evolving sport industry. Design thinking enables students to become designers and to approach problems from an empathetic and creative perspective to promote innovative solutions to a wide range of problems. This paper will introduce design thinking concepts and how they align with advancing sport management curriculum before outlining the steps required for instructors to include design thinking into a sport management capstone class.

Youth sports is facing a crisis that threatens the ecosystem of youth sports. Innovation—the ability to generate and execute new ideas—is needed to stem the negative tide of a declining and aging officiating pool and improve the recruitment and retention of sports officials. Without creative problem solving and innovation by many different stakeholders in youth sports, the benefits that children receive from participating in sports are threatened by the lack of qualified officials to referee competitive games and matches. This case pushes students well past the news headlines of angry parents yelling at officials and deep into several problem spaces that emerge from the application of design thinking. Students are introduced to design thinking and prompted to innovate solutions to problems framed using the design thinking process. Students can select a preidentified problem space, then work through an ideation session facilitated by the instructor.