Abstract

Design Thinking (DT) has been applied to the corporate world with elan, and organizations have made DT their mainstay.  Tourism in its Sustainable avatar can be seen in Community Based Ecotourism (CBE) which has brought to the forefront the Community who live in the forest fringes to adopt to business opportunities with support from the Government, primarily the Forest Departments (FD) across various states in India, and helped in the creation of special purpose vehicles (SPV) which have provided for livelihood options, income generating opportunities at the same point in time to preserve and conserve the ecology, environment, the flora and fauna, which is the mandate of the FD.  The researcher paper talks about the efforts of applying DT to community-based business activities and with a population which may not be able to appreciate the larger nuances of business, as we seen in the modern contemporary term.  The adoption of DT to businesses and organization, was easily juxtaposed on account of the understanding the associates/employees already had about DT.  But when it came to the community helping them to understand the facets was tough, but once they understand that this is for their betterment, they have never looked back. We realized that the experiences provided by the communities were not short of the corporate world and look forward to implement this further as best practices.