Kevin Bethune: Innovation lessons from a nuclear engineer turned Air Jordan designer

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Apr 11, 2023

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ADVICE

Use Stretch Work To Prove New Skills

Do stretch assignments and offer to work for free on side projects to demonstrate skills beyond your title.
Kevin used coffee chats to pivot into creative projects and proved value by delivering prototypes and ideas in his spare time.

ANECDOTE

Early Morning Mentorship Led To Jordan Credits

Kevin got his foot in Jordan by doing early-morning mentorship work with Dwayne Edwards and grinding on briefs outside his day job.
They met at 6am, he worked nights, and after a year he earned design credits and was invited into Jordan product reviews.

INSIGHT

Orchestrate Breadth And Depth For Teams

Multidisciplinary work will be the norm, so individuals must orchestrate breadth and depth in collaboration, communication, and visioning.
Kevin argues you may need to step out of meetings to use your deep expertise and bring substantive work back to the team.

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Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/kevin-bethune-reimagining-design

Not many people can say they’ve gone from being a nuclear engineer to helping design Air Jordans at Nike. But that’s part of Kevin Bethune’s story, and today we chat with him about his journey from engineering to design.

Kevin also published a best-selling book last year called Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation. We talk about what he hoped to learn from writing the book, and discuss a critique of design thinking, the role of rigor in creativity, and the rewards and challenges of working with multidisciplinary teams. Bio

Kevin Bethune is a Design and innovation executive leader serving, scaling and leading creative teams as large as 30+ nationwide, and influencing global teams as large as 70+ in the definition of design functional excellence and innovation best practices while respecting local differences.

He’s also an entrepreneur and founder of dreams • design + life, a “think tank” combining strategic design and industrial design to address human-centric and holistic opportunities to solve latent needs across industries that benefit from integrated physical, digital and service-oriented experiences.

Kevin is a globally recognized speaker who’s given talks at TED, DMI, IDSA, AIGA, MIT, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Notre Dame, ArtCenter, Lucerne, Nike, BCG and Google Design.

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