David Kelley
David Kelley (b. 1951) is the founder of IDEO, the design and innovation consultancy, and co-founder of the Stanford d.school (the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design), where he has been a professor since 1978. He is one of the central figures responsible for popularizing design thinking as a methodology.
Kelley trained as an engineer and worked in product design — Apple's first mouse was an early IDEO project — before becoming increasingly interested in the psychology and culture of creative work. What shifted his focus was recognizing, through years of client workshops, that the most significant obstacle to creative output wasn't skill or process. It was the fear of judgment that caused capable people to opt out of creative identity entirely.
His 2012 TED talk, "How to Build Your Creative Confidence," crystallized this into a public argument. Drawing on Albert Bandura's work on self-efficacy and guided mastery, he argued that creative confidence is not a fixed trait but a recoverable one — suppressed by early social wounds and rebuilt through sequences of small creative successes.
The d.school is the institutional expression of this belief: a program designed to build creative confidence in engineers, business students, and others who don't think of themselves as creative. Its graduates include the founders of several major companies.
Kelley has faced cancer and survived, which he credits with clarifying his mission: to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way.