teachers with multidisciplinary backgrounds are meant to immerse students in a system of innovative thinking with specific goals for solving practical problems the courses may build on input from any part of stanford university including themes such as fostering democracy aiding individuals with threatening medical profiles or paving the way for the next great startups instead of only trying to solve readydefined problems students are meant to creatively identity what needs fixing and how to go about it with the help of direct observation and interviews after identifying a problem worth of working on students imagine possibilities through ideation and then select a solution for prototyping and testing