As the 21st century progresses, we are grappling with far more challenging business and social problems than ever before. Solving them will require a new approach that might be found in the most unlikely of places: design. Tim Brown shows how we can take the principles of design beyond the studio to apply them to many of the most urgent challenges facing business, society, and government today from streamlining healthcare to innovating breakthrough customer solutions, and from saving energy to ending poverty and obesity. In his talk, Brown will explain that there has never been a more important time for us all to start thinking like designers: to spot patterns in complexity, to synthesize new ideas from fragmented parts; to empathize with people different from ourselves and translate observations into breakthroughs.

Tim Brown is CEO and president of IDEO, one of the world's ten most innovative companies according to Fast Company, with clients including Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Pepsi, and Procter & Gamble. He advises senior executives and boards of Fortune 100 companies, has written for Harvard Business Review, has spoken at the World Economic Forum and the TED Conference, and his designs have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Axis Gallery in Tokyo, and the Design Museum in London.

Tim Brown visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters as part of the Authors@Google series.