Where do these ideas and numbers come from?

The visualisations shared on this site were derived from data reported in two publications:

1. Nathan Crilly (2024). Design thinking and other approaches: How different disciplines see, think and act. Cambridge University Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781009498685 and its Appendices.

2. Nathan Crilly (2026). Critical thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking and many more: A comparative bibliometric analysis of prevalence and distribution. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 59, 102014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2025.102014 and its Dataset.

The first of these publications is a concise book that examines the conceptual relationships between various thinking skills, including design thinking, systems thinking, entrepreneurial thinking, and computational thinking (among others). The second is a peer-reviewed journal article analysing the prevalence and distribution of twenty thinking skills in the research literature (selected from an initial sample of 78).

Both publications detail the challenges involved in identifying, comparing and integrating thinking skills, and explore the limitations of doing so. They describe the underlying sources for the ideas and data they analyse, along with the associated methods of extraction, processing and representation. In addition to reporting original research, they also review contributions from many other valuable publications in this area.

Extracts from the conceptual and bibliometric work were presented in a keynote address delivered at the 4th International Conference of Possibility Studies in 2024.

This site was developed by Nathan Crilly.

Nathan is Professor of Design at the University of Cambridge, where he specialises in understanding human behaviour in the context of innovation. His research examines the creativity of designers, inventors and entrepreneurs, and the experiences of users, customers and other stakeholders. Drawing on this work, Nathan advises companies on implementing creative approaches.

Nathan is the academic lead for the internationally award-winning course 'Creativity problem solving and design thinking' offered by Cambridge Advance Online. Through this course, Nathan has trained hundreds of professionals from sectors including management consultancy, finance, healthcare, legal services and education. You can read more about his work and find other publications on his University of Cambridge page.