Design Thinking for Business

Innovating drives change. People drive innovation. Design thinking fuels both. In this course, we start with a mindset, add a toolset, and hone a skill set. Design thinking requires diligence, discipline, and foresight. It requires imagination, empathy, comfort with ambiguity, and creative courage. It also requires shared language, common tools, and trust.

This course leads students to learn the fundamental tools and practices of innovation and design thinking in a fast-paced collaborative virtual environment. Students work together in small teams to identify, understand, and then solve business problems. This is a learn-by-doing course. We learn how to frame the problem, user-centered research, developing valuable customer insight, ideation and prototyping and innovation storytelling.

The goal of this course is to equip students with the skills and practices that power change in businesses in five core segments of innovation: product, service, business, policy, and civil society. These practices equip one to meaningfully contribute to human-centered problem solving and change-making.